Remember the Maine?  Cortés, during his campaign to conquer the
ancient empire of the Mexica—the word which anthropologists
would now have us use when we talk of the Aztecs—wrote to the
emperor Charles V that he hoped to offer him an empire as great
as the one he already had in Germany. As we know, he was able to
do it. His distant cousin, Pizarro, offered the emperor the Inca
empire; and other conquistadors, such as Gonzalo de Quesada,
were able to fill in territories lying between Peru and Mexico.
Thus was founded one of the greatest of European political
enterprises.  In its duration and cultural influence, the
Spanish empire overshadows the empires of Britain, France,
Holland, Belgium, and even Russia. “He who has not seen Mexico
does not know Spain,” I once wrote myself, and Spanish
linguistic influence over the territory of what used to be
considered Anglo-Saxon America is still growing. The Spanish
empire in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines lasted till
1898.  Further, though the empires of other