Few histories afford lessons of greater value than those of Spain and Portugal. They teem with proofs that independence and liberty are not less important to the wealth and political power of a country than to its happiness; that neither natural advantages nor the character of the inhabitants, neither increase of territory nor external peace and domestic tranquillity can in any measure counterbalance the destructive effects of a foreign yoke, or of a despotic government.

But the people who afterwards were called Iberian are probably nothing else than a mixture of this ancient population with the long-headed, blond race of Cro-Magnon, which came from the north and appears in France and northern Africa. For that reason alone they might be supposed to have been in Spain, situated as it is between the two, even if certain remains of their culture did not make this supposition almost a certainty. 

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