extermination was the alternative which they offered to the world, and which was announced in letters of fire and blood from Spain to the Ganges. The states of Christian Europe did but retort the principle and the practice, when, in a series of crusades, kept up for more than three hundred years, they poured desolation over the west of Asia, in order to rescue the sepulcher of the Prince of Peace from the possession of unbelievers.

Such were the principles of the public law and the practice under them, as they existed when the great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries took place. When the Portuguese began to push their adventures far to the south on the coast of Africa, in order to give to those principles the highest sanction, they procured of Pope Nicholas the Fifth, in 1454, the grant of the right of sovereignty over all the heathen tribes, nations, and countries discovered or to be discovered by them, from Africa to India, and the exclusive title thus conferred was recognized by all the other nations of Christendom.

On the return of Columbus from his first voyage, the king of Spain, not to fall behind his neighbors in the strength of his title, lost no time in obtaining from Pope Alexander the Sixth a similar grant of all the heathen lands discovered by Columbus, or which might hereafter be discovered, in the west. To preclude as far as possible all conflict with Portugal, the famous line of demarcation was projected from the north to the south, a hundred leagues west of the Azores, cutting the earth into halves, like an apple, and, as far as the new discoveries were concerned, giving to the Spaniards all west of the line, and confirming all east of it to the Portuguese, in virtue of the grant already mentioned of Pope Nicholas the Fifth.

I regret that want of time will not allow me to dwell upon the curious history of this line of demarcation, for the benefit of all states having boundary controversies, and especially our sister republics of Nicaragua and Costa Rica. It is sufficient to say, that, having had its origin in the papal bull just referred to of 1454, it remained a subject of dispute and collision for three hundred and sixty-one years, and was finally settled at the Congress of Vienna in 1815!

The territorial extension of Portugal and Spain, which resulted from the discovery of America, was followed by the most extraordinary effects upon the commerce, the finances, and the politics generally, of those two countries, and through them of the world. The overland trade to the East, the great commercial interest of the Middle Ages, was abandoned. The whole of South America, and a considerable part of North America, were, in the course of the sixteenth century, settled by those governments; who organized in their Transatlantic possessions a colonial system of the most rigid and despotic character, reflecting as far as was practicable in distant provinces beyond the sea the stern features of the mother country. The precious metals, and a monopoly of the trade to the East, were the great objects to be secured. Aliens were forbidden to enter the American viceroyalties; none but a contraband trade was carried on by foreigners at the seaports. To prevent this trade, a severe right of search was instituted along the entire extent of the coasts, on either ocean. I have recently had an opportunity, in another place, to advert to the effects of this system upon the international relations of Europe.1 Native subjects could emigrate to these vast colonial possessions only with the permission of the government. Liberty of speech and of the press was unknown. Instead of affording an asylum to persons dissenting from the religion of the state, conformity of belief was, if possible, enforced more rigidly in the colonies than in the mother country. No relaxation in this respect has, I believe, taken place in the remaining colonies of Spain even to the present day. As for the aboriginal tribes, after the first work of extermination was over a remnant was saved from destruction by being reduced to a state of predial servitude. The dejected and spiritless posterity of the warlike tribes that offered no mean resistance to Cortés and Pizarro are now the hewers of wood and the drawers of water to Mexico and Peru. In a word, from the extreme southern point of Patagonia to the northernmost limit of New Mexico, I am not aware that anything hopeful was

1 Speech on the affairs of Central America, in the Senate of the United States, 21st of March, 1853.

done for human improvement by either of the European crowns which added these vast domains to their territories.

If this great territorial extension was fruitless of beneficial consequences to America, it was not less so to the mother countries. For Spain it was the commencement of a period, not of prosperity, but of decline. The rapid influx of the precious metals, in the absence of civil liberty and of just principles and institutions of intercourse and industry, was productive of manifold evils; and from the reign of Philip the Second, if not of Charles the Fifth, the Spanish monarchy began to sink from its haughty position at the head of the European family. I do not ascribe this downfall exclusively to the cause mentioned; but the possession of the two Indies, with all their treasures, did nothing to arrest, accelerated even, the progress of degeneracy. Active causes of decline no doubt existed at home; and of these the Inquisition was the chief.

There was the weight that pulled her down.

The spirit of intolerance and persecution, the reproach and scandal of all countries and all churches, Protestant as well as Catholic (not excepting the Pilgrim Fathers of New England), found an instrument in the Holy Office in Spain, in the sixteenth century, such as it never possessed in any other age or country. It was not merely Jews and heretics whom it bound to the stake; it kindled a slow, unquenchable fire in the heart of Castile and Leon. The horrid atrocities practiced at home and abroad, not only in the Netherlands, but in every city of the mother country, cried to Heaven for vengeance upon Spain; nor could she escape it. She intrenched herself behind the eternal Cordilleras; she took to herself the wings of the morning, and dwelt in the uttermost parts of the sea; but even there the arm of retribution laid hold of her, and the wrongs of both hemispheres were avenged in her degeneracy and fall.

But let us pass on to the next century, during which events of the utmost consequence followed each other in rapid succession, and the foundations of institutions destined to influence the fortunes of Christendom were laid by humble men,

who little comprehended their own work. In the course of the seventeenth century, the French and English took possession of all that part of North America which was not preoccupied by the Spaniards. The French entered by the St. Lawrence; followed that noble artery to the heart of the continent; traced the great lakes to their parent rivulets and weeping fountains; descended the Mississippi. Miracles of humble and unavailing heroism were performed by their gallant adventurers and pious missionaries in the depths of our Western wilderness. The English stretched along the coast. The geographer would have pronounced that the French, in appropriating to themselves the mighty basins of the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence, had got possession of the better part of the continent. But it was an attempt to compose the second volume of the "Fortunes of America," in advance of the first. This it was ordained should be written at Jamestown and Plymouth. The French, though excelling all other nations of the world in the art of communicating for temporary purposes with savage tribes, seem, still more than the Spaniards, to be destitute of the august skill required to found new states.1 I do not know that there is such a thing in the world as a colony of France growing up into a prosperous commonwealth. Half a million of French peasants in Lower Canada, tenaciously adhering to the manners and customs which their fathers brought from Normandy two centuries ago, and a third part of that number of planters of French descent in Louisiana, are all that is left to bear living witness to the amazing fact, that in the middle of the last century France was the mistress of the better half of North America.

It was on the Atlantic coast, and in the colonies originally planted or soon acquired by England, that the great work of the seventeenth century was performed, slowly, toilsomely, effectively. A mighty work for America and mankind, of which even we, fond and proud of it as we are, do but faintly guess the magnitude! It could hardly be said, at the time, to prosper in any of its parts. It yielded no return to the pecuniary capital invested. The political relations of the colonies from the first were those of encroachment and resistance; and even the moral

1 "La France saura mal coloniser et n'y réussira qu'avec peine." HUGO, "Le Rhin," Tom. II, p. 280.

VICTOR

principle, as far as there was one, on which they were founded, was not consistently carried out. There was conflict with the savages, war with the French and Spaniards, jarring and feud between neighboring colonies, persecution of dissenting individuals and sects, perpetual discord with the crown and the proprietaries. Yet, in the main and on the whole, the WORK was done. Things that did not work singly worked together; or if they did not work together, they worked by reaction and collision. Feeble germs of settlement grew to the consistency of powerful colonies; habits of civil government rooted themselves in a soil that was continually stirred by political agitation; the frame of future republics knit itself, as it were in embryo, under a monarchical system of colonial rule; till in the middle of the eighteenth century the approach of mighty changes began to be dimly foreseen by gifted spirits. A faint streak of purple light blushed along the eastern sky.

Two things worth mentioning contributed to the result. One was the absence of the precious metals. The British colonies were rich in the want of gold. As the abundance of gold and silver in Mexico and Peru contributed, in various ways, to obstruct the prosperity of the Spanish colonies, the want of them acted not less favorably here. In the first settlement of a savage wilderness the golden attraction is too powerful for the ordinary routine of life. It produces a feverish excitement unfavorable to the healthy growth and calm action of the body politic. Although California has from the first had the advantage of being incorporated into a stable political system, of which, as a sister State, she forms an integral part, it is quite doubtful whether, looking to her permanent well-being, the gold is to be a blessing to her. It will hasten her settlement; but that would at any rate have advanced with great rapidity. One of the most intellectual men in this country, the author of one of the most admirable works in our language, I mean "Two Years before the Mast," once remarked to me, that "California would be one of the finest countries in the world to live in, if it were not for the gold."

The other circumstance which operated in the most favorable manner upon the growth of the Anglo-American colonies was the fact, that they were called into existence less by the