I will not dwell on the different results that have attended different courses of action with reference to the conquered territories of North and South America; nor attempt to trace the decline of one power at the expense of another. Spain and Portugal, unfortunately for themselves, dealt with their gifts on purely selfish principles; and the consequence of such a system was, not only the loss of the greater part of their colonies, but an almost total estrangement between the parent and child, never afterwards thoroughly healed. We attempted the same game in North America, and the giant-like progress of the United States has followed; only that, wiser in our generation, more forgiving, and actuated by true commercial principles, we have cultivated, to the utmost extent, relations of amity and good-will with the new power, and both countries are largely gainers thereby, and will continue to be so while the same feelings of mutual concession and respect actuate both.
Whilst, therefore, North America has made such astonishing progress, and completely outstrips the Old World in rapidity of thought and execution, carrying her commerce and people to the limits of the habitable globe, the states to the southward have had many severe ordeals to go through—arising, in the first place, from the cause just mentioned, viz., that the mother countries considered their colonies as mere appanages, and prevented communication, in some cases even intercourse, with other nations. Secondly, from the disseverment of the link which united them to Europe, having an entirely new phase to pass through, new forms of government to establish, and fresh relations to cultivate; whilst another immediate effect of the revolution was to drive away most of the wealthy inhabitants who, being Spanish and Portuguese citizens, were not a little vain of their superiority in that respect to their colonial-born brethren. This fruitful source of dissent and violence in nearly all the disturbances by which the several states were torn is by no means wholly obliterated to this day, any more than in some of the transmarine possessions of Great Britain, in either hemisphere. Then came intestine divisions among the American-born colonists themselves, raging between the upstart leaders of mushroom parties, whose very names it taxed the memory of men at the time to remember; and, as a matter of course, there followed all the thousand drawbacks resulting from a state of anarchic confusion. Hence, as is obvious must have been the case under such circumstances, material progress has been slow, and political progress for a long time almost imperceptible, if not frequently retrogressive, if one may use a phrase so seemingly contradictory. Moreover, until of late years very little was known of the internal resources of South America, with the exception of the Brazils—a country to which a variety of circumstances conspired to impart an impetus along the groove of civilization and consequent advancement. Paramount amongst those aids was undoubtedly the establishment there, in 1806, of the old Portuguese monarchy, consequent upon the European troubles of the house of Braganza. The inappreciable advantage of this regular form of government, arising out of local monarchic institutions, that country has retained, though under a new sovereign and with a liberalized system of administration, ever since, with every guarantee for continuously rapid but enduring improvement. Still, even Brazil was, to Europeans, comparatively speaking, an unknown region, to which, in incongruous confusion, attached associations of the soft and the savage, of barbarism and luxury, of the majestic and the feeble, in the minds of all nearly whose reading about her was not corrected by personal familiarity with the country itself. But ignorance so arising is being happily fast dissipated; and it shall not be the author’s fault if its departure be not further expedited on some points to which it still adheres.