Abstract

Spain in the Old World and the New

This article presents information on several books. The book ""The Rise of the Spanish Empire in the Old World and in the New," by Roger Bigelow Merriman and "Rise of the Spanish-American Republics As Told in the Lives of Their Liberators," by William Spence Robertson. Among the countries of Europe that played a great role in the history none is so little known to the English-speaking world as Spain. Here Spain itself, and the realms it controlled in the Mediterranean and beyond the sea, are the primary themes. Merriman wisely has refrained from looking. He has sought inspiration rather in Rafael Altamira's monumental history of Spain and of Spanish civilization. Robertson's volume on the overthrow of Spanish power for then U.S., calls forth observations of a different order. Robertson, nevertheless, has seen lit to use this form of exposition in relating the story of a series of revolutions that had a multiplicity of leaders, a kaleidoscopic variance of scene, and an extraordinary assemblage of divergent factors which transport a bewildered reader from one country and one period of time to another, without affording him much chance to get any systematic notion of what it was all about.