There existed in the United States in the late nineteenth century a strong conviction that the Nicaragua route utilizing the San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua was the only satisfactory route for an interoceanic canal across the American Isthmus. Not only had Lesseps earlier favored this route for a lock canal, but the activity of the French interests in Panama, and then their failure there, had reinforced in the minds of many United States citizens their old desire for a canal across Nicaragua. But the United States interest in a Nicaragua canal had never been dependent upon what happened in Panama; in the early 1880’s, as the French began work in Panama, and later as well, sentiment in the United States favored a Nicaragua canal even though the French should ultimately succeed, for influential persons in the United States—President Hayes and General Grant among them—feared foreign monopoly of a single interoceanic waterway at a time when they had come to regard our free access to such a transit as vital to the national interest.

Although a border question had existed between Ecuador and Peru since independence, it was not until 1887 that they made serious efforts to resolve their mutual frontiers. The formative first phase of the dispute extended from the creation of Ecuador in 1830; the second began August 1, 1887, with the Bonifaz-Espinosa agreement and concluded in 1910 with the total collapse of the settlement procedures therein pacted. The intervening twenty-three years saw the development of arguments destined to be used to some extent even down to the present, witnessed the futile attempt of the mother country to arbitrate, and brought the major American powers into the matter for the first time.

Cuba experienced during the early 19th century an intellectual explosion whose impact has reverberated into the 20th century. It was sparked by a shabby, ascetic little priest with luminous eyes and an eloquent smile, who, while laboring for 25 years as a missionary in New York, kept the lines of contact open with his forward-looking followers. He believed in dignity, social justice, and freedom, under God and His Church, for every people, and he did not consider these obtainable for Cuba under Spanish rule. A Cuban scholar in our times has designated him, “Forger of the Conscience of Cuba.”

Before you bombard with the china and charge with the cutlery, know that I have taken counsel with my peers. My topic I put to them with a plea that they give me a judgment of my theme, or some notion of the tack I should take. “Singularly barren, your theme,” came the first response. Said the next: “You ask for a tack; I suggest a sledge hammer.” Awesome, though, was this: “If you say what ought to be said, you will be crucified; and if you don’t, can you be pleased with that?” “If you can do it undetected, slide off the subject,” advised a wily one. Another, though he discounted them, had heard rumbles, womblings I take to spring from the viscera, not the head. The secretaries of our academy assure me, however, that these infirmities, already affecting the skin, often break out in a rash upon their records.

Although ninety per cent of the documentation of the Mexican Holy Office of the Inquisition is to be found in the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, a critical group of manuscripts must be consulted in Spain if the researcher is to study the Mexican institution effectively. These records are contained in the archive of the Consejo de la Suprema y General Inquisición and in the plethora of royal documents emanating from and arriving in the Council of the Indies. Unfortunately the manuscripts are scattered among the three great archives in the Iberian peninsula: Archivo de Simancas at Valladolid, Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid, and Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla. The Simancas and Sevilla documents on the Mexican Inquisition are relatively sparse; but the AHN houses the extant archive of the Suprema and is a required visit for any investigator in Mexican Inquisition materials from 1571 to 1820.