through an ordeal of risk and speculation. There
were also countries where no European could labour; and the ominous
work of transporting African negroes as slaves into the colonies--begun
by Spain in the first decade of the 16th century, followed up by
Portugal, and introduced by England in 1562 into the West Indies, at a
later period into New England and the Southern States, and finally
domiciled by royal privilege of trade in the Thames and three or more
outports of the kingdom,--after being done on an elaborate scale, and
made the basis of an immense superstructure of labour, property and
mercantile interest over nearly three centuries, had, under a more just
and ennobling view of humanity, to be as elaborately undone at a future
time.

These are some of the difficulties that had to be encountered in
utilizing the great maritime and geographical conquests of the new
epoch. But one cannot leave out of view the obstacles, arising from
other sources, to what might be expected to be the regular and easy
course of affairs. Commerce, though an undying and prevailing interest
of civilized countries, is but one of the forces acting on the policy of
states, and has often to yield the pace to other elements of national
life. It were needless to say what injury the great but vain and
purposeless wars of Louis XIV. of France inflicted in that country, or
how largely the fruitful and heroic energies of England were absorbed in
the civil wars between Charles and the Parliament, to what poverty
Scotland was reduced, or in what distraction and savagery Ireland was
kept by the same course of events. The grandeur of Spain in the
preceding century was due partly to the claim of her kings to be Holy
Roman emperors, in which imperial capacity they entailed intolerable
mischief on the Low Countries and on the commercial civilization of
Europe, and partly to their command of the gold and silver mines of
Mexico and Peru, in an eager lust of whose produce they brought cruel
calamities on a newly-discovered continent where there were many traces
of antique life, the records of which perished in their hands or under
their feet. These ephemeral causes of greatness removed, the hollowness
of the situation was exposed; and Spain, though rich in her own natural
resources, was found to be actually poor--poor in number of people, poor
in roads, in industrial art, and in all the primary conditions of
interior development. An examination of the fore