her
race, nor religion, nor political theory has been in the same degree
an incentive to the perpetuation of universal enmity and national
strife. The threatened interests were compelled to unite for the
self-government of nations, the toleration of religions, and the
rights of men. And it is by the combined efforts of the weak, made
under compulsion, to resist the reign of force and constant wrong,
that, in the rapid change but slow progress of four hundred years,
liberty has been preserved, and secured, and extended, and finally
understood.

II

THE NEW WORLD

GREATER CHANGES than those which were wrought by governments or armies
on the battlefield of Italy were accomplished at the same time,
thousands of miles away, by solitary adventurers, with the future of
the world in their hands. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to
understand that the ocean is not a limit, but the universal waterway
that unites mankind. Shut in by Spain, they could not extend on land,
and had no opening but the Atlantic. Their arid soil gave little scope
to the territorial magnate, who was excluded from politics by the
growing absolutism of the dynasty, and the government found it well to
employ at a distance forces that might be turbulent at home.

The great national work of exploration did not proceed from the
State. The Infante Henry had served in the African wars, and his
thoughts were drawn towards distant lands. He was not a navigator
himself; but from his home at Sagres, on the Sacred Promontory, he
watched the ships that passed between the great maritime centre at the
mouth of the Tagus and the regions that were to compose the Portuguese
empire. As Grandmaster of the Order of Christ he had the means to
equip them, and he rapidly occupied the groups of islands that lie
between Africa and mid Atlantic, and that were a welcome accession to
the narrow territory of Portugal. Then he sent his mariners to explore
the coast of the unknown and dreaded continent. When they reached the
Senegal and the Gambia, still more, when the coast of Guinea trended
to the East, they remembered Prester John, and dreamed of finding a
way to his fictitious realm which would afford convenient leverage for
Christendom, at the back of the dark world that faced the
Mediterranean.

As the trade of the country did not cover the outlay, Henry began in
1442 to capture negroes, who were imported as slaves, or sold with
advantage to local chief