Don Salvador de Madariaga’s latest work deserves an extensive review, not only because of the importance of its subject, but because its distinguished author justly holds a position of authority among the English public as an interpreter of his country’s history and civilization.

Perhaps none of the great movements of history has been more consistently misrepresented than the Spanish conquest and colonization of America. No culture has suffered more from the ‘whig interpretation of history’ than that of Spain. For at least two centuries there existed what seemed to many Spaniards a conspiracy to belittle and distort the contribution of their country to human civilization. Of late years this tendency has been reversed, and the ‘revaluation’ of Spain’s past, in which English and North-American scholars have played a prominent part, has swept away a great deal of ignorant prejudice. As regards Spanish America in particular, there have been published in both the Americas and in Spain a large number of careful historical studies which make such prejudice no longer excusable. Most of these works will, however, be unknown to the general reader in England, and there is therefore need of a re-presentation and summing-up of the facts.