Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Miscellaneous Works of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 5
Victories of Cortez were gained over savages who had no letters; who were ignorant of the use of metals; who had not broken in a single animal to labor who wielded no better weapons than those which could be made out of sticks, ?ints, and fish - bones; who re garded a horse-soldier as a monster, half man and half beast who took an arquebusier for a sorcerer, able to scatter the thunder and lightning of the skies. The people of India, when we subdued them, were ten times as numerous as the Americans whom the Span iards vanquished, and were, at the same time, quite as highly civilized as the Victorious Spaniards. They had reared cities larger and fairer than Saragossa or Toledo, and buildings more beautiful and costly than the Cathe dral of Seville. They could Show bankers richer than the richest firms of Barcelona or Cadiz, viceroys whose splendor far surpassed that of Ferdinand the Catholic, myriads of cavalry and long trains of artillery which would have astonished the Great Captain. It might have been expected that every Englishman who takes any interest in any part of history would be curious to know how a handful of his countrymen, separated from their home by an immense ocean, subjugated, in the course of a few years, one of the greatest empires in the world. Yet, unless we greatly err, this subject is, to most readers, not only insipid, but positively distasteful.
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