MCAT Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills: Passage 6 — Flashcards

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It must be remembered that Spain, in the years  following her brilliant conquests of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, lost strength  and vigor through the corruption at home  induced by the unearned wealth that flowed  into the mother country from the colonies, and  by the draining away of her best blood. Nor did  her sons ever develop that economic spirit  which is the permanent foundation of all  empire, but they let the wealth of the Indies  flow through their country, principally to  London and Amsterdam, there to form in more  practical hands the basis of the British and  Dutch colonial empires.    
The priest and the soldier were supreme,  so her best sons took up either the cross or the  sword to maintain her dominion in the distant  colonies, a movement which, long continued,  spelled for her a form of national suicide. The  soldier expended his strength and generally laid  down his life on alien soil, leaving no fit successor of his own stock to carry on the work  according to his standards. The priest under the  celibate system, in its better days left no off- spring at all and in the days of its corruption  none bred and reared under the influences that  make for social and political progress. The dark  chambers of the Inquisition stifled all advance  in thought, so the civilization and the culture of  Spain, as well as her political system, settled  into rigid forms to await only the inevitable  process of stagnation and decay. In her proud-  est hour an old soldier, who had lost one of his  hands fighting her battles against the Turk at  Lepanto, employed the other in writing the  masterpiece of her literature, which is really a  caricature of the nation.    
There is much in the career of Spain that  calls to mind the dazzling beauty of her 'dark-  glancing daughters,' with its early bloom, its  startling—almost morbid—brilliance, and its  premature decay. Rapid and brilliant was her  rise, gradual and inglorious her steady decline,  from the bright morning when the banners of Castile and Aragon were flung triumphantly  from the battlements of the Alhambra, to the  short summer, not so long gone, when at Cavite  and Santiago with swift, decisive havoc the last  ragged remnants of the once world-dominating  power were blown into space and time, to hover  disembodied there, a lesson and a warning to  future generations. Whatever her final place in  the records of mankind, whether as the pioneer  of modern civilization or the buccaneer of the  nations or, as would seem most likely, a goodly  mixture of both, she has at least—with the  exception only of her great mother, Rome—  furnished the most instructive lessons in politi-  cal pathology yet recorded, and the advice to  students of world progress to familiarize themselves with her history is even more apt today  than when it first issued from the encyclopedic  mind of Macaulay nearly a century ago. Hardly  had she reached the zenith of her power when  the disintegration began, and one by one her  brilliant conquests dropped away, to leave her  alone in her faded splendor, with naught but  her vaunting pride left, another 'Niobe of nations.' In the countries more in contact with  the trend of civilization and more susceptible to  revolutionary influences from the mother  country this separation came from within,  while in the remoter parts the archaic and out  grown system dragged along until a stronger  force from without destroyed it.    

— excerpt from Noli Me Tangere by José Rizal