| Popular sympathy in the United States for the South-American states. |
The strong sympathy of the people of the United States for the cause of independence in Middle and South America really violated the spirit of neutrality, and the influence of this sympathy upon the Senators and Representatives in Congress was very disturbing to a cool and judicial consideration of the attitude which the Government should preserve in the matter of the Panama mission.
| The President's nominations confirmed. No influence of slavery perceptible in the vote upon the nominations. |
The friends of the mission at last won the day by a vote of twenty-four to nineteen. Fifteen Northern Senators voted to send representatives to the congress, and seven voted against doing so. Nine Southern Senators voted to send representatives, and twelve voted against doing so. This vote hardly sustains the claim of certain of the historians, that the slavery interest was the primal cause of the opposition to the Panama mission. One of the most eminent among these says that the historical significance of the contest over the question was that slavery threw aside its municipal character, its character as a Commonwealth institution, and demanded to prescribe both the internal and external policies of the nation. This sounds dramatic, but if it means, as it appears to mean, that when, in a federal system of government, any interest or institution regulated by Commonwealth law asks protection from the general Government against foreign influence and interference it thereby asserts command over the nation, it is a proposition which also sounds decidedly outré to an American lawyer. The Constitution of the United States imposed the international protection of all such interests and institutions upon the general Government when it reserved such interests and institutions to the jurisdiction of the Commonwealths and gave the general Government alone international standing. When, then, such interests and institutions claim that protection, they are only asking for a right guaranteed to them by the Constitution, and are by no means asserting an authority over the Constitution and the country.
| The Haytian question at the congress. |
It is true that Mr. Salazar said in his communication something about the status of Hayti being a subject of deliberation for the congress. It was also true that Hayti had been for thirty years in a state of chronic insurrection and revolution, and that the former negro slave population had, by the assassination of their former masters and mistresses, freed themselves from bondage, taken possession of the country, and were reducing it to barbarism at a rapid pace. It is furthermore true that the slaveholders in the United States did not wish their own homes to be made the scenes of any such ruin and savagery, or themselves or their families to be made subject to any such fate; and, it may be confidently hazarded, that no Northerner, at that day, viewed such possibilities with anything but aversion and horror. It required a quarter of a century of radical abolition recklessness, the blunder-crime of secession, and the desperation of long-continued, and at first unsuccessful, war, to make the men of the North regard without sympathy such dangers to their Southern brethren. The North and the South simply could not have divided, at that time, upon the question of the relation to Hayti. There was only one view upon that subject, and that was that the example and influence of Hayti must be held far away from these shores. This could have been accomplished, however, as well by attending the congress as by staying away, perhaps better. At least, the Haytian question was no chief ground of opposition to the mission, and certainly no chief ground in favor of the mission.
| Cuba and Porto Rico. |