hrough 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 Judaea 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.

[13] "Hailstone chorus:"--Handel's Israel in Egypt.

In this movement, so far as it regards man, in this machinery for sifting
and winnowing the merits o