“THE SPANIARD IN HISTORY,”
by James C. Fernald. 12mo, cloth, 144 pages. With colored maps of Spain and Cuba. Price, 75 cents. New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls Company. The publishers and author of this work bespeak for it worth, readability, and accuracy. From a socialistic, literary, and political view point it is timely. It shows the enterprise of the firm, putting a book on the market a month ago which prints in its closing chapter Commodore (now Admiral) Dewey’s despatch of May 4. The book is not designed to be a history of Spain, but to show by salient features at critical times in Spain’s history the real character of the Spanish people. We see the Spaniard of Roman times; then the Visigothic conquerors so irresistible in their onslaught, so feeble in their decline. We find developed among them, even in that early day, a bitterness of religious persecution such as was then shown nowhere else in Christendom. The book sketches briefly, rapidly, yet clearly, the Rise of the Spanish Monarchy, the Inquisition, Conquest of Granada, Expulsion of Jews and Moors, and the Spaniard in the West Indies in Mexico and Peru, on the Throne, in the Netherlands, in the Philippines, in Cuba, and on the Sea. How much Spain’s character might have been changed had another religion than the Roman Catholic found place in her dominions, the author does not say. It will be of interest to the reader of this little book to keep this question in mind. We do not know that there can be found in any other single volume so comprehensive and clear a review of the essential facts of Spanish history as illustrating Spanish character, developed largely under Roman Catholicism. The author has fortified his positions throughout by constant quotation and citation of standard works on the different divisions of the subject. It is an excellent little book of reference, of painstaking accuracy and justice.