in everything, as we believe,
“Are sprung
Of Earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.”[88]
Southward from the thirtieth parallel stretches the domain of the Latin races, already mingled with and being absorbed by the Anglo-Saxon, in Canada, California, and the Southern States of the Union. Vast as this region is, for it comprehends all Central America and all the Southern Continent, it is infinitely less prosperous, less powerful, less peopled, than what we may call Saxon America. Mexico is a byword and a reproach for savage anarchy and murderous license. Neither Chili, nor Peru, nor even Brazil approaches Canada in solid power and the auspicious promise of future greatness. The Latin race seems dwarfed and cowed by the neighbourhood of the energetic Anglo-Saxon, is swiftly retiring before it in North America, and in the course of centuries will probably be subjugated by it, even in the southern division of the great Continent.
A considerable portion of South America, however, is uncultivated, unpeopled, and but imperfectly explored. There the Desert re-appears with—
“The pale, cold aspect of a wearied friend,”[89]
under its most sharply defined forms and most impressive conditions. The supremacy of the whites over the indigenous tribes is almost nominal; and if the latter are gradually dying out, the catastrophe, in this instance, is due rather to their own lack of vigour, energy, and capacity, than to the pressure of civilization.
However rapid may be the growth of population in North America, however great the rapidity—shall we say the avidity?—of the American squatters in their conquest and appropriation of the soil, the Desert still occupies, principally in “the far West” and the North—that is to say, in the angle comprised between the line of the great lakes and the Rocky Mountains—an area almost equal to the whole of Continental Europe. There we find, as Mr. Johnstone points out, the largest plains in the world. One such, for example, is that immense basin which extends from the mouths of the Mackenzie, in the icy Arctic Sea, even to the remote Delta of the Mississippi, and from the huge chain of the Rocky Mountains, with their piny recesses and snowy peaks, to the less rugged and more pastoral range of the Alleghanies; a total area of 4,400,000,000 square yards (3,245,000 square miles). A table-land of gentle elevation, nowhere above 1500 feet, and rarely more than 700 feet high, separates this territory into two secondary basins.
The north-east, which pours its waters into the Arctic Ocean, Hudson’s Bay, and through the Canadian lakes and River St. Lawrence, into the Atlantic; and,
The south basin, of the Missouri-Mississippi, whose mighty waters flow into the Gulf of Mexico.
It is in the latter that the traveller encounters the great grassy plains of the Prairies or Savannahs which are so remarkable a feature of North America, and which chiefly lie along the western bank of the Mississippi. “There are no prairies,” says Sir J. Richardson, “to the north of Peace River, and the level lands which border the Rocky Mountains do not extend beyond the Great Salt Lake.”