Said a Spanish knight:
This is Castile, she makes men and wastes them.
Says Captain Carlos Gilman Calkins:
This sublime and terrible phrase sums up Spanish history.
Says Havelock Ellis:
Everything has happened that could happen to kill out the virile, militant, independent elements of Spanish manhood.[1] War alone, if sufficiently prolonged and severe, suffices to deplete the nation of its most vigorous stocks. "The warlike nation of to-day. . . is the decadent nation of to-morrow." The martial ardor and success of the Spaniards lasted for more than a thousand years. It was only at very great cost that the Romans subdued the Iberians and down to the sixteenth century, the Spaniards were great soldiers. The struggle in the Netherlands wasted their energies and then finally at Rocroy, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Spanish infantry that had been counted the finest in Europe went down before the French, the military splendor of Spain vanished" ("The Soul of Spain").
It is a question whether Spain suffered most from the scattering of her strong men over seas, from her perpetual struggles in Europe or from the Inquisition. This sinister institution was more wasteful and more cruel in Spain than anywhere else, leading to the extinction of independent minds and of virile intellectuality.
In Spain as in France, the continuance of peace with the cessation of the loss and waste over seas is bringing a financial and industrial recuperation, which must be slowly followed by a physical and moral advance. It is claimed that Spain now enjoys "an intellectual and artistic renaissance that will make her memorable when her heroes are forgotten."
Germany
Germany suffered perhaps scarcely less than France from the wars of Louis XIV. and of the two Napoleons. German writers, however, have been much less frank than the French and also less lucid in discussing their national disabilities. They have given but scanty records of the racial waste their wars have involved. Moreover, the organization of modern Germany, a socialist state under military domination, has tended to minimize the visible distinctions among racial strains. Every man has his place. It is not easy to fall below one's class, corespondingly difficult to rise. Universal compulsory education, technical as well as academic, saves even the feeble from absolute incom-
- ↑ In this connection, Mr. Ellis extolls the beauty, grace and spirit of the Spanish women and suggests the theory that so far as feminine traits go, there has been no reversal of selection. "The women of Spain," he thinks, "are on the average superior to the men."
