and agents alike. Columbus returns, freighted with wondrous tidings, to the Spanish shore; the nation rises and claps its hands; the nation kneels to bless its gods at all its shrines, and chants its delight in many a choral Te Deum. What, then, do they think is gained? Why, El Dorado! Have they not gained a whole world of gold and silver mines to buy jewelled cloaks and feathers and frippery with? Have they not gained a cornucopia of savages, to support new brigades at home by their enslavement, and new bishoprics abroad by their salvation? Touching, truly, is the childish eagerness and bonhommie with which those Spaniards in fancy assume, as it were, between thumb and finger, this continent, deemed to be nothing less than gold, and feed with it the leanness of hungry purses; and the effect is not a little enhanced by the extreme pains they are at to say a sufficient grace over the imagined meal. "Oh, wonderful, Pomponius!" shouts the large-minded Peter Martyr. "Upon the surface of that earth are found rude masses of gold, of a weight that one fears to mention!... Spain is spreading her wings," etc. He is of the minority there, who does not suppose this New World a Providential donation to aid him to dinners, dances, and dawdling, or at best to promote his "glory" and pride of social estimation. Even Columbus, more magnanimous than most of his contemporaries, is not so greatly more wise. The noblest use he can conceive for his discovery is to aid in the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. With the precious metals that should fall to his share, says his biographer, he made haste to vow the raising of a force of five thousand horse and fifty thousand foot for the expulsion of the Saracens from Jerusalem. Nor is this the only instance in which even the noble among men have sought to clutch the grand opening futures, and wreathe the beauty of their promise about the consecrated graves of the past. "Servants of Sepulchres" is a title which even now, not individuals alone, but whole nations, may lawfully claim.
The Old World, we say, seized upon this magnificent new force now thrown into history, and harnessed it unsuspiciously to its own car, as if it could have been designed for no other possible use. Happily, however, the design was different, and Providence having a peculiar faculty of protecting its own plans, the holding of the reins after such a steed proved anything but a sinecure. Spain, indeed, rode in a high chariot for a time, but at length, in that unlucky Armada drive, crashed against English oak on the ocean highways, and came off creaking and rickety,—grew thenceforth ever more unsteady,—finally, came utterly to the ground, with contusions, fractures, and much mishap,—and now the poor nation hobbles hypochondriacally upon crutches, all its brave charioteering sadly ended. England drove more considerately, but could not avoid fate; so in 1783 she, too, must let go the rein with some mental disturbance. For the great Destiny was not exclusively a European Providence,—had meditated the establishment of a fresh and independent human centre on the western side of the sea. The excellent citizens of London and Madrid found themselves incapable of crediting this until it was duly placarded in gunpowder print.—It is, indeed, an unaccountable foible men have, not to recognize a plain fact till it has been published in this blazing hieroglyphic. What were England and France doing at Sebastopol? Merely issuing a poster to this effect,—"Turkey is not yours,"—in a type that Russia could feel free to understand. Terribly costly editions these are, and in a type utterly hideous; but while nations refuse to see the fact in a more agreeable presentation, it may probably feel compelled to go into this ugly, but indubitable shape.—Well, somewhat less than a century since, England had committed herself to the proposition, that America was really a part or dependency of Europe, a lower-caste Europe, having about the same relation to the Cisatlantic continent that the farmer's barn has to his house. Mild
