The San Francisco call., 1898-05-29

doing a great deal of boasting in
 Jregard to the past glories won by
 their seamen. The impression
 gained from reading their state ments is that Spain's career at sea has been one grand series of successes. In stead, the fact is, 1t has been one grand series of disasters. And particularly so, when her fleets met the men-of- war of the Anglo Saxon.
 In Spain's early history there is lit tie of maritime nature. Most of her fighting was done on land and with well equipped armies she won enough money to enable her to employ the best soldierly talent of the day. By a stroke of luck Spain found herself the ruling power over vast areas of land and with money enough on hand to employ men to explore the furthest ends of the earth for her. At one time Spain was really the first naval power.
 But even when circumstances made her the first of naval powers Spain was never equal to the task she undertook, says the London Speaker. A great Italian sailor secured for her the em- pire of the West The fighting prowess LII LhO great CdptdIIiS NOIl lOI her Mexico and Peru. Her splendid armies conquered Portugal and brought her the widest colonial dominion of the age.
 But 1t was not by sea that Spain won her supremacy, and not by naval victories that she laid her grip on every quarter of the globe. Even when her power and wealth seemed irresistible, when her military reputation was at it's height, when the world was strewn with her Territories and the ocean laden with her argosies and fleets, her real naval power was utterly incommensur- ate with the astonishing pretensions which it made
 As soon as England and Holland laid a finger on it, her maritime empire crumbled into dust. The Armada only revealed fact which English sailors had long suspected, and the conscious ness of which explains Drake's sublime contempt for the menaces of Spain the fact that, even at the zenith of their fame, the SpaniardS had no mastery of the arts by which the sea is held.
 Is there on record a battle which shows that Drake and Blake and Jervis and Nelson were mistaken in their low estimate of Spanish seamen? Can any 
 miral of genius, or of any great Span ish naval victory since Lepanto, which was won largely by Venetian crews?
 If we look at the history of Spain since the Armada, we find only a sue cession of naval disasters, a succession of triumphs for any state which has ventured to grapple with the Spaniards on the seas.
 Take the history of the seventeenth century and follow the career of the Dutch admirals and of the greatest of Nelson's predecessors, Blake Take the eighteenth century and notice how even Alberoni and Patino failed, with all their efforts, to resuscitate the fleets of Spain.
 Take the modern war in Chile. and mark how few antagonists Cochrane could find there worthy of his steel. Even in the days of her greatest power at sea, Spain was notoriously deficient in the capacity of her sailors and since those days she has steadily declined.
 To-day Spanish gunners and Spanish engineers are confessedly among the worst In Europe. It would be little short of a miracle if 1t should turn out that Spain, within the last two de- .cades, had bred race of seamen ca-