Elects of the Love of introduction of widely-recognized media of exchange, like gold and silver, developed to an extraordinary extent the notions of personal property and individual ownership—senti ments almost unknown to the savage condition,where all property belongs to the family. The " thirst for gold " and the " hunger for riches " (auri are frequent themes of reprobation by the writers in classical ages, both sacred and profane. The "love of money" is condemned by the apostle as " the root of all evil." In the New Testament the chances of the rich to inherit the kingdom of heaven are placed little above zero. These references prove that the evil passions stimulated by the liberty of personal acquisition had deeply seared the ancient world at the period of the Roman empire. The prevalence of such passions in a nation, their advantages and disadvantages to it and the race, are the questions which must occupy the ethnologist in his study of this branch of his subject.
A striking modern example may be selected in the Spanish monarchy. At the period when the discovery of Columbus opened to the Spanish nation the teeming storehouses of the New World the final overthrow of the Moors had left the Peninsula filled with brave and energetic sol diers of one faith and language, but cursed with a contempt for peaceful labor and an insatiable desire for wealth.
The hunt for gold, and no higher object, inspired Columbus; and the troops of erne] and greedy adventurers that descended like a flock of vul tures on the feeble communities of the Western continent cared for noth ing but to extort by any and every means this precious metal from the wretched natives. When Pedro de Alvarado tore with his own hands the gold rings from the lips and ears of the chief of the Cakchiquels, who had received him with hospitality, and the bleeding native prince wept before him, it was a picture of the general attitude of the two races; and when the Nicaraguans seized a Spanish goldhunter and poured the molten metal down his throat, it was symbolic of how they regarded his nation and a portent of its fate.
The continent was ransacked for gold from Oregon to Patagonia; the most fertile tracts were disregarded, or cultivated only by the cruellest exactions of slave-labor; the mines were worked in a manner equally reckless of economy and human life. Illiterate soldiers of fortune, like Pizarro, destroyed ruthlessly the results of centuries of nascent civiliza tion, while more scholarly but not more scrupulous adventurers, like Cortes, could boast of what "jolly corsairs" they had been in their Western life. The fertile slopes of the Appalachians, the green prairies and rich bottom-lands of the Mississippi Valley, now supporting tens of millions of prosperous inhabitants, were marked on the Spanish maps "lands of no account" (lierras de ningun provecho), because they yielded no gold.
And what was the result? When looking on a previous page (38) for the most deteriorated specimens of the white race, we found none others so low as the American descendants of the proud Castilians. Nor did the gold they got benefit the mother-country. It is a standing puzzle with historians how the Indies poured their auriferous stream for generations into Spain and left it as poor as ever—far poorer, for not only was its currency debased, but its ancient energy, its valor, its spirit of enterprise and prog ress, had been bartered and lost for the gold which was no longer its own.