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THE OVERTHROW

OF THE

EUROPEAN COLONIAL SYSTEM.

CHAPTER I.

AMERICA CLAIMS LEGISLATIVE INDEPENDENCE OF ENGLAND. PELHAM'S ADMINISTRATION.

1748.

1748.

In the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and forty-eight, Montesquieu, wisest in his age of the reflecting statesmen of France, apprised the cultivated world that a free, prosperous, and great people was forming in the forests of America, which England had sent forth her sons to inhabit. The hereditary dynasties of Europe, all unconscious of the rapid growth of the power which was soon to involve them in its new and prevailing influence, were negotiating treaties among themselves to bring their last war of personal ambition definitively to an end. The great maritime powers, weary of hopes of conquest and ignorant of coming reform, desired repose. To restore possessions as they had been, or were to have been, was accepted as the condition of peace; and guarantees were devised to keep them safe against vicissitude. But the eternal flow of existence never rests, bearing the human race onwards through continuous change. Principles grow into life by informing the public mind, and in their maturity gain the mastery over events; following each other as they are bidden, and ruling without a pause. No sooner do the agitated waves begin to subside, than, amidst the formless tossing of the billows, a new messenger from the Infinite

Spirit moves over the waters; and the bark which is freighted with the fortunes of mankind yields to the gentle breath as it first whispers among the shrouds, even while the beholders still doubt if the breeze is springing, and whence it comes, and whither it will go.

The hour of revolution was at hand, promising freedom to conscience and dominion to intelligence. History, escaping from the dictates of authority and the jars of insulated interests, enters upon new and unthought of domains of culture and equality, the happier society where power springs freshly from ever renewed consent; the life and activity of a connected world.

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For Europe, the crisis foreboded the struggles of generations. The strong bonds of faith and affection, which once united the separate classes of its civil hierarchy, had lost their vigor. In the impending chaos of states, the ancient forms of society, after convulsive agonies, were doomed to be broken in pieces, and the fragments to become distinct, and seemingly lifeless, like the dust; ready to be whirled in a deadly sand-storm by the tempest of public rage. The voice of reform, as it passed over the desolation, would inspire animation afresh; but in the classes whose power was crushed, as well as in the oppressed who knew not that they were redeemed, it might also awaken wild desires, which the ruins of a former world could not satiate. In America, the influences of time were moulded by the creative force of reason, sentiment, and nature; its political edifice rose in lovely proportions, as if to the melodies of the lyre. Peacefully and without crime, humanity was to make for itself a new existence.

A few men of Anglo-Saxon descent, chiefly farmers, planters, and mechanics, with their wives and children, had crossed the Atlantic, in search of freedom and fortune. They brought the civilization which the past had bequeathed to Great Britain; they were followed by the slave-ship and the African; their prosperity invited emigrants from every lineage of Central and Western Europe; the mercantile system to which they were subjected prevailed in the councils of all metropolitan states, and extended its

restrictions to every continent that allured to conquest, commerce, or colonization. The accomplishment of their independence would agitate the globe, would assert the freedom of the oceans as commercial highways, vindicate power in the commonwealth for the united judgment of its people, and assure to them the right to a self-directing vitality.

The authors of the American Revolution avowed for their object the welfare of mankind, and believed that they were in the service of their own and of all future generations. Their faith was just; for the world of mankind does not exist in fragments, nor can a country have an insulated existence. All men are brothers; and all are bondsmen for one another. All nations, too, are brothers; and each is responsible for that federative humanity which puts the ban of exclusion on none. New principles of government could not assert themselves in one hemisphere without affecting the other. The very idea of the progress of an individual people, in its relation to universal history, springs from the acknowledged unity of the race.

From the dawn of social being, there has appeared a tendency towards commerce and intercourse between the scattered inhabitants of the earth. That mankind have ever earnestly desired this connection, appears from their willing homage to the adventurers, and to every people who have greatly enlarged the boundaries of the world, as known to civilization. The traditions of remotest antiquity celebrate the half-divine wanderer who raised pillars on the shores of the Atlantic; and record, as a visitant from the skies, the first traveller from Europe to the central rivers of Asia. It is the glory of Greece that, when she had gathered on her islands and among her hills the scattered beams of human intelligence, her numerous colonies carried the accumulated light to the neighborhood of the ocean and to the shores of the Euxine; her wisdom and her arms connected continents.

When civilization intrenched herself within the beautiful promontory of Italy, and Rome led the van of European reform, the same movement continued, with still vaster

results; for, though the military republic bounded the expansive spirit of independence by giving dominion to property, and extended her own influence by the sword, yet, heaping up conquests, adding island to continent, crushing nationalities, offering a shrine to strange gods, and citizenship to every vanquished people, she extended over a larger empire the benefits of fixed principles of law, and a cosmopolitan polytheism prevailed as the religion of the world.

To have asserted clearly the unity of mankind was the distinctive character of the Christian religion. No more were the nations to be severed by the worship of exclusive deities. The world was instructed that all men are of one blood; that for all there is but one divine nature and but one moral law; and the renovating faith taught the singleness of the race, of which it imbodied the aspirations and guided the advancement. The tribes of Northern Europe, emerging freshly from the wild nurseries of nations, opened new regions to culture, commerce, and refinement. The beams of the majestic temple, which antiquity had reared to its many gods, were already falling in; the roving invaders, taking to their hearts the regenerating creed, became its intrepid messengers, and bore its symbols even to Iceland and Siberia.

Still nearer were the relations of the connected world, when an enthusiast reformer, glowing with selfish ambition, and angry at the hollow forms of idolatry, rose up in the deserts of Arabia, and founded a system, whose emissaries, never diverging widely from the warmer zone, conducted armies from Mecca to the Ganges, where its principle was at variance with the limitation of castes; and to the Ebro, where a life of the senses could mock at degenerate superstitions, yet without the power to create anew. How did the two systems animate all the continents of the Old World to combat for the sepulchre of Christ, till Europe, from Spain to Scandinavia, came into conflict and intercourse with the arts as well as the arms of the south and east, from Morocco to Hindostan !

In due time appeared the mariner from Genoa. To Columbus God gave the keys that unlock the barriers of the ocean; so that he filled Christendom with his glory. The

voice of the world had whispered to him that the world is one; and, as he went forth towards the west, ploughing a wave which no European keel had entered, it was his high purpose not merely to open new paths to islands or to continents, but to bring together the ends of the earth, and join all nations in commerce and spiritual life.

While the world of mankind is accomplishing its nearer connection, it is also advancing in the power of its intelligence. The possession of reason is the engagement for that progress of which history keeps the record. The faculties of each individual mind are limited in their development; the reason of the whole strives for perfection, has been restlessly forming itself from the first moment of human existence, and has never met bounds to its capacity for improvement. The generations of men are not like the leaves on the trees, which fall and renew themselves without melioration or change; individuals disappear like the foliage and the flowers; the existence of our kind is continuous, and its ages are reciprocally dependent. Were it not so, there would be no great truths inspiring action, no laws regulating human achievements: the movement of the living world would be as the ebb and flow of the ocean; and the mind would no more be touched by the visible agency of Providence in human affairs. In the lower creation, instinct may more nearly be always equal to itself; yet even there the beaver builds his hut, the bee his cell, with a gradual acquisition of inherited thought and increase of skill. By a more marked prerogative, as Pascal has written, "not only each man advances daily in the sciences, but all men unitedly make a never ceasing progress in them, as the universe grows older; so that the whole succession of human beings, during the course of so many ages, ought to be considered as one identical man, who subsists always, and who learns without end."

It is this idea of continuity which gives vitality to history. No period of time has a separate being; no public opinion can escape the influence of previous intelligence. We are cheered by rays from former centuries, and live in the sunny reflection of all their light. What though thought

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