The Spanish Pioneers by Charles Fletcher Lummis

This, then, was the situation in the New World at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Spain, having found the Americas, had, in a little over a hundred years of ceaseless exploration and conquest, settled and was civilizing them. She had in the New World hundreds of towns, whose extremes were over five thousand miles apart, with all the then advantages of civilization, and two towns in what is now the United States, a score of whose States her sons had penetrated. France had made a few gingerly expeditions, which bore no substantial fruit; and Portugal had founded a few comparatively unimportant towns in South America. England had passed the century in masterly inactivity, -- and there was not so much as an English hut or an English man between Cape Horn and the North Pole.

That later times have reversed the situation; that Spain (largely because she was drained of her best blood by a conquest so enormous that no nation even now could give the men or the money to keep the enterprise abreast with the world's progress) has never regained her old strength, and is now a drone beside the young giant of nations that has grown, since her day, in the empire she opened, -- has nothing to do with the obligation of American history to give her justice for the past. Had there been no Spain four hundred years ago, there would be no United States to-day. It is a most fascinating story to every genuine American, -- for every one worthy of the name admires heroism and loves fairplay everywhere, and is first of all interested in the truth about his own country.