d themselves the simple question, whether Spain
was likely to endure a Scotch colony in the midst of her Transatlantic
dominions. It was notorious that she claimed the sovereignty of the
isthmus on specious, nay, on solid, grounds. A Spaniard had been the
first discoverer of the coast of Darien. A Spaniard had built a town
and established a government on that coast. A Spaniard had, with great
labour and peril, crossed the mountainous neck of land, had seen rolling
beneath him the vast Pacific, never before revealed to European eyes,
had descended, sword in hand, into the waves up to his girdle, and had
there solemnly taken possession of sea and shore in the name of the
Crown of Castile. It was true that the region which Paterson described
as a paradise had been found by the first Castilian settlers to be a
land of misery and death. The poisonous air, exhaled from rank jungle
and stagnant water, had compelled them to remove to the neighbouring
haven of Panama; and the Red Indians had been contemptuously permitted
to live after their own fashion on the pestilential soil. But that soil
was still considered, and might well be considered, by Spain as her own.
In many countries there were tracts of morass, of mountain, of forest,
in which governments did not think it worth while to be at the expense
of maintaining order, and in which rude tribes enjoyed by connivance
a kind of independence. It was not necessary for the members of the
Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies to look very far
for an example. In some highland districts, not more than a hundred
miles from Edinburgh, dwelt clans which had always regarded the
authority of King, Parliament, Privy Council and Court of Session, quite
as little as the aboriginal population of Darien regarded the authority
of the Spanish Viceroys and Audiences. Yet it would surely have been
thought an outrageous violation of public law in the King of Spain to
take possession of Appin and Lochaber. And would it be a less outrageous
violation of public law in the Scots to seize on a province in the very
centre of his possessions, on the plea that this province was in the
same state in which Appin and Lochaber had been during centuries?

So grossly unjust was Paterson's scheme; and yet it was less unjust
than impolitic. Torpid as Spain had become, there was still one point on
which she was exquisitely sensitive. The slightest encroachment of any
other European power even on the