The Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, would have been the scenes of the Spaniards' settlement for a hundred years. Though afterward they took Florida, that was as a mere side issue; it was unconsidered, neglected, after Cuba and Mexico; and was passed on at length to the race that came to the mainland more than a hundred years after the landfall at San Salvador.
Who can estimate the consequences of a fate which should have sent Columbus straight on his way! Who can compass the thought of the millions of country-loving Americans of our race unborn here, but nurtured under skies now foreign to their very nature, but for that glittering flock of tropical birds whirling southwestwardly? It is no idle conjecture; von Humboldt, one of the wisest of cosmographers, says that never in the world's history had the flight of birds such momentous consequences. "It may be said," he avers, "to have determined the first settlements in the new continent, and its distribution between the Latin and Germanic races." He believed that the Gulf Stream would have carried Columbus around Cape Hatteras. It might indeed have done so.
We of the United States may well believe that the hand of Providence guided those birds on that October day; but none the less are we compelled to admit the strange dependence of human events upon circumstances that are most trifling in themselves.
CHAPTER V
IF QUEEN ELIZABETH HAD LEFT A SON
OR DAUGHTER
Never did greater events hinge upon a woman's caprice against marriage than those which were poised on the will of Elizabeth, Queen of England, in the long years that lay between the time when, as a young queen, it was proposed to marry her to the Duke of Anjou, and the sere and yellow leaf of her womanhood, when her potential maternity was past.
If Elizabeth had married, as her people often implored her to do, and if her progeny had sat upon the throne and continued the sway of the Tudors, half a century of turmoil and bloodshed, under the essentially foreign rule of the Stuarts, might have been spared to England. The Revolution doubtless would never have taken place. The material and intellectual advance of England and all Britain would have been steady and sure upon the splendid foundation of the Elizabethan structure.
But, on the other hand, as good is often evolved from evil, much that is sacred and vital to the whole Anglo-Saxon race might have been missed. The Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus Act and other guarantees that were obtained through the Revolution or the Commonwealth would have been wanting in the English Constitution. Oliver Cromwell and John Hampden would probably have remained in rustic obscurity. All modern Europe would have lacked the political incentive, the revolutionary impulse, the constructive audacity, which it has derived from the Grand Remonstrance, from the battlefields of Marston Moor and Naseby, where royalty was overthrown by the arm of the common people, and from the eternal menace that lay in the death-block of King Charles.