The discovery of the American Continent flashed on the world like the discovery of a new Creation. In reading the correspondence of the learned at the time, the return of Columbus, and the knowledge which that return brought, is spoken of with a rapture of language more resembling an Arabian tale than the narrative of the most adventurous voyage of man. The primitive races of their fellow-beings, living in the simplicity of nature, under forests of the palm, with all delicious fruits for their food, with gold and pearls for their toys, and the rich treasures of new plants and animals of all species for their indulgence and their use, were described with the astonishment and delight of a dream of Fairy-land, or the still richer visions of restored Paradise.
Yet, when the hues of imagination grew colourless by time, the continents of the West displayed to the ripened knowledge of Europe virtues only still more substantial. The contrast between the northern and southern portions of the New World is of the most striking kind. It is scarcely less marked than the distinction between the broken, deeply-divided, and well-watered surface of Europe, and the broad plains, vast mountain ranges, and few, but mighty rivers, which form the characteristic features of Asia. In North America, we see a land of singularly varied surface, in its primitive state, covered with forest; with an uncertain climate; a soil seldom luxuriant, often sterile, every where requiring, and generally rewarding human industry; watered by many rivers, penetrated in almost every direction by navigable streams, and traversed from north to south, an unusual direction for rivers, by an immense stream, the Mississippi, bringing down the furs, the produce of the north, the corn of the temperate zone, the fruits of the tropics, and connecting all those regions with the commerce of Europe: a natural canal, of more than two thousand miles, without a perceptible difference of breadth, from New Orleans to the falls of St Anthony. The Arkansas, Missouri, Ohio, noble rivers, traverse the land in a variety of directions, with courses of from fifteen hundred to two thousand miles; and to the north of the United States, a chain of vast inland seas, a succession of Mediterraneans, surrounded by productive provinces, rapidly filling with a busy population.
The southern portion of the New World exhibits the plains of Tartary, the solitary mountain range of India, the fertility of the Asiatic soil. It, too, has its Ganges and its Indus, in the Amazon and the Rio de la Plata; but its smaller streams are few and feeble. It has the fiery heat of India, the dangerous exhalations of the jungle, the tiger and the lion, though of a less daring and powerful species; and the native, dark, delicate, timid, and indolent, as the Hindoo.
Without speaking of the contrast as perfectly sustained in all its points, it is unquestionable that North and South America have been formed for two great families of humankind as distinct as energy and ease; that the North is to be possessed only as the conquest of toil, while the South allows of the languor into whose hand the fruit drops from the tree.
May it not also be rationally conjectured, that in the discovery Europe and America were equally the objects of the Providential benevolence? It was palpably the Divine will to give Europe a new and powerful advance in the fifteenth century. Printing, gunpowder, and the mariner’s compass, were its gifts to Europe; to be followed and consummated in that new impulse at once to religious truth and to social improvement, which so soon transpired in the German Reformation, and in the commercial system of England and the continental nations. The extension of this mighty impulse to America rapidly followed. The first English colony was planted in North America in the reign of Elizabeth, the great protectress of Protestantism; and the first authentic knowledge of South America was brought to Europe by the discoveries of Englishmen, following the route of Columbus, and going beyond him. It is true that the intercourse of the South with the energetic qualities and free principles of Europe was impeded by an influence which, from its first being, has been hostile to the free progress of the human mind. The Popedom threw its shadow over Spanish America, and the great experiment of civilisation was comparatively thrown away wherever the priest of Rome was paramount. The land, too, witnessed a succession of slaughters, and the still more fearful trade in the unfortunate natives of Africa. But the most powerful contrast was furnished to mankind in the rapid growth of the Protestant states of the north, in their increasing commerce, in the vigour of their laws, in the activity of the public mind, and the ascent of their scattered and feeble communities into the rank and the enjoyments of a great nation.
Nor are we to speak of South America as having wholly slept during the period since its discovery. If all the larger faculties which give nations a place in history remained in a state of collapse under the pressure of Spain, society had made a forward step in every province of that great territory. The inhabitants had never relapsed into their primitive barbarism; they had laws, commerce, manufactures, and literature, all in a ruder degree than as developed under the vivid activity of Europe, but all raising the provinces into a gradual capacity of social vigour, of popular civilisation, and perhaps even of that pure religion without which national power is only national evil. Perhaps the cloud which has rested for so many ages over the moral soil of South America, may have been suffered to remain until the soil itself acquired strength for a larger product under a more industrious generation. It is not improbable that as the gold and silver of the South were evidently developed, in the fifteenth century, to supply the new commercial impulse of that time of European advance, the still more copious, and still more important, agricultural wealth of countries overflowing with unused exuberance—the magnificent tropical fertility of the continents beyond the ocean—may have been reserved to increase the opulence and stimulate the ardour of a period which the Steam-boat and the Railway have marked for a mighty change in the earth; and in which they may be only the first fruits of scientific skill, the promises of inventions still more powerful, the heralds of a general progress of mankind, to whose colossal strides all the past is feeble, unpurposed, and ineffectual.
The invasion of the Mexican territory by the army of the United States has naturally attracted the eyes of Europe; and whether the war shall issue in a total conquest or in a hollow peace, its results must strongly affect the future condition of the country. Mexico must at once take the bold attitude of an empire, or must be dis-severed, province by province, until its very name is no more. But no country of the western world has a position more fitted for empire. Washed on the east by the gulf which bears its name, and on the west by the Pacific, it thus possesses direct access to two oceans, and by them to the most opulent regions of the globe. On the south it can dread no rival in the struggling state of Guatemala. But the north is the true frontier on which the battle of its existence is to be fought, if fought at all, for beyond that barrier stretch the United States. The extent of its territory startles European conceptions, extending in north latitude from fifteen to forty-two degrees, and in west longitude from eighty-seven to one hundred and twenty-five degrees. Its surface, on a general calculation, contains about a million and a half of square miles, or about seven times the dimensions of France. Yet, though thus approaching the equator, the climate of Mexico is in general highly favourable to life and to the products of the temperate zone: the incomparably larger portion of its surface being a succession of table-lands or elevated plains, where, with the sun of the tropics blazing almost vertically, the evenings are refreshingly cool, the breeze is felt from the mountains or the ocean, and the days are scarcely hotter than those of Europe.
We now glance at the principal features of the great territory.
Vera Cruz, its chief commercial city, and medium of intercourse with Europe, is handsomely built, exhibiting the usual signs of commercial wealth, in the stateliness of its private houses, and in the rarer peculiarity of wide and cleanly streets. But when did commerce build with any other consideration than that of trade? Vera Cruz is proverbially unhealthy; a range of swamps in the vicinity loads the summer air with fatal exhalations; and the Vomito, the name for a rapid disease, evidently akin to the fearful Black-vomit of Africa, requires either the most vigilant precaution, or more probably the most fortunate chance, to escape its immediate seizure of the frame. Yet it is said that this disease seldom attacks the natives of the city.
But the general susceptibility of the European frame to tropical disease, is tried here in almost every shape of suffering; and typhus, yellow fever, and almost pestilence, terribly thin the concourse of the stranger.