Note return — PART V.

There is in the science and process of colonization, as in every complex act of man, a secret philosophy—which is first suspected through results, and first expounded by experience. Here, almost more than any where else, nature works in fellowship with man. Yet all nature is not alike suited to the purposes of the early colonist; and all men are not alike qualified for giving effect to the hidden capacities of nature. One system of natural advantages is designed to have a long precedency of others; and one race of men is selected and sealed for an eternal preference in this function of colonizing to the very noblest of their brethren. As colonization advances, that ground becomes eligible for culture—that nature becomes full of promise—which in earlier stages of the science was not so; because the dreadful solitude becomes continually narrower under the accelerated diffusion of men, which shortens the space of distance—under the strides of nautical science, which shortens the time of distance—and under the eternal discoveries of civilization, which combat with elementary nature. Again, in the other element of colonization, races of men become known for what they are; the furnace has tried them all; the truth has justified itself; and if, as at some great memorial review of armies, some solemn armilustrum, the colonizing nations, since 1500, were now by name called up—France would answer not at all; Portugal and Holland would stand apart with dejected eyes—dimly revealing the legend of Fuit Ilium; Spain would be seen sitting in the distance, and, like Judæa on the Roman coins, weeping under her palm-tree in the vast regions of the Orellana; whilst the British race would be heard upon every wind, coming on with mighty hurrahs, full of power and tumult, as some "hail-stone chorus,"13 and crying aloud to the five hundred millions of Burmah, China, Japan, and the infinite islands, to make ready their paths before them. Already a ground-plan, or ichnography, has been laid down of the future colonial empire. In three centuries, already some outline has been sketched, rudely adumbrating the future settlement destined for the planet, some infant castrametation has been marked out for the future encampment of nations. Enough has been already done to show the course by which the tide is to flow, to prefigure for languages their proportions, and for nations to trace their distribution.