In 1821, an independent Mexico, developing a national conscience and abundant enthusiasm, planned to declare its independence economically and socially as well as in political affairs. Unfortunately, many prominent Mexicans were unable to realize that their new nation could escape neither the Spanish past nor its Mexican present.

Mercantilism had been the prime characteristic of colonial commerce. During the colonial period, only two Mexican ports were provided for importation and exportation. These were Vera Cruz, for Atlantic trade, and Acapulco, for the Manila shipments. The whole export-import commerce of the New World was forced to pass through Spain's ports of Cádiz and Seville, and only in Spanish ships. Licensed vessels embarked at certain prescribed periods when they traveled with a convoy.

British interest in the region of the River Plate developed relatively early, but, due to Spain's monopolistic trade policies regarding her American possessions, few Englishmen were allowed to visit that area during the colonial period. It was not until after 1810, with the declaration of independence of Argentina, that trade barriers were lifted, and countless Englishmen sailed to the port of Buenos Aires with adventure and profit in mind. This little known part of the globe attracted the most diverse personalities—unemployed soldiers, tradesmen, mining engineers, scientists, missionaries, diplomats, and just plain adventurers. The great majority seemed to have one characteristic in common, however—the English mania for keeping extensive diaries and journals.

While the negotiations between the United States and Ecuador in the period 1909 to 1913 came to no fruitful conclusion, they still remain a subject of interest because in microcosm they illustrate so well how the Department of State operated in the Taft administration. The negotiations embraced all the standard considerations: strategy, vested American interests, projected loans, power politics, and “ up-lift.” The Department's interest in Ecuador quickened in this period because Ecuador owned the Galápagos Islands, an archipelago which lay six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador and about one thousand miles southwest of the Isthmus of Panama, where the canal was under construction.

In 1898 the United States fought Spain, terminating her colonial empire in the Americas and in the Pacific. With this conquest came problems for the United States in Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. From October 18, 1898, to May 1, 1900, United States military governments controlled the island of Puerto Rico; and on April 12, 1900 the President of the United States approved the organic act (Foraker Act) which Congress had passed as the first civil government for Puerto Rico. The study of Church-state relations in this period is an interesting one, since it represents the conflict of two widely different conćepts: a residue of Spanish patronage which fostered the Church and its schools while confining the activity of the Church because of paternalism, anti-clericalism and a trend toward the philosophy of positivism; and Yankee-Americanism that was dominantly Protestant and wedded to the proposition that the Church must be separated from the state. It was a rugged wrenching that brought the Puerto Rican Church from a position of dependency to that of autonomy and self-support. The Church, moreover, had to engage in a political and legal fight for the retention of such properties as schools, churches, and cemeteries. Into the fray came such interested competitors as a United States Commission sent by President McKinley to report on the conditions in Puerto Rico, a small but vocal group of anti-clerical Puerto Ricans, three military governments, and the first civil governors.

The Mexican savant, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645-1700), was mathematician, astronomer, linguist, cartographer, historian, and New Spain's most successful collector of manuscripts containing Mexican antiquities. His generosity in helping other scholars knew no bounds, as Vetancurt, Gemelli Carreri and even European and Oriental savants attested. Don Carlos not only devoted himself to the acquisition of an encyclopedic knowledge, to the collecting of valuable documents and to the helping of fellow scholars, but he also found time to publish numerous books, for the most part of a historical nature. Unlike his contemporary Kino or Bolton of our own days, Sigüenza y Góngora ordinarily did not pursue his historical investigation over desert and ocean trail. He preferred the quiet of his study to the excitement of distant exploration.