ave wealth and power too;
Or else with blood and desolation
They'll tear it out o' th' heart o' th' nation.--

HUDIBRAS.

Notwithstanding the success of the many daring and lawless adventurers
who visited the Pacific Ocean, or "Great South Sea," as it is called in
the maps and travels of the period, and who reaped many a golden harvest
there, about the time of the first James and Charles of England, the
coasts washed by its waves were but seldom visited, and its waters
seldom ploughed by any other keels than those of discovery ships for
many years. Chili, Peru, Mexico, and California, after having been
definitively ceded to the Spanish crown, constituted an El Dorado, whose
gates could only be opened by a formal declaration of war. Spain was
generally considered by the other European powers to have a double right
to South America, namely, that of discovery and conquest; and after an
ineffectual struggle to wrest the golden prize from the grasp of its
legitimate possessor, England, and the rest of the "high contracting
powers," acquiesced in her possessing it, the more readily because they
wished the same kind of title should be acknowledged in their own case.
Accordingly discovery and conquest have, to this day, been considered as
good and lawful titles, and a sort of deed of conveyance, on the part of
the natives, to their discoverers and conquerors of all and sundry their
lands and landed estates, together with their goods and chattels, when
of any value.

His Most Catholic Majesty, then, finding his claim to the New World
fully established, set about civilizing his new conquest in good
earnest, and sending out swarms of priests, backed of course by the
military portion of the secular arm, with glory to God on their lips,
and hatred to his creatures in their hearts, with the sword in one hand
and the crucifix in the other, soon convinced the unhappy natives of
their damnable heresies. Their simple religion was destroyed, millions
perished by the sword or the tender mercies of the Holy Inquisition, and
as many more in the mines; and civilization and religion kissed each
other, and rested from their labors of love.

This was the most received method of converting whole nations at once,
then in vogue--we Protestants of the present day are far more humane; we
only distribute among the newly discovered nations of the earth, rum and
Calvinism, gunpowder and the venereal