of the west coast
across the Isthmus to the shores of the broad ocean, nature's great
highway, which washed at once the shores of Old and of New Spain. From
the Caribbean, Great Britain, although her rivals had anticipated her
in the possession of the largest and richest districts, derived nearly
twenty-five per cent of her commerce, during the strenuous period when
the Mediterranean contributed but two per cent.

But over these fair regions too passed the blight, not of despotism
merely, for despotism was characteristic of the times, but of a
despotism which found no counteractive, no element of future
deliverance, in the temperament or in the political capacities of the
people over whom it ruled. Elizabeth, as far as she dared, was a
despot; Philip II. was a despot; but there was already manifest in her
subjects, while there was not in his, a will and a power not merely to
resist oppression, but to organize freedom. This will and this power,
after gaining many partial victories by the way, culminated once for
all in the American Revolution. Great Britain has never forgotten the
lesson then taught; for it was one she herself had been teaching for
centuries, and her people and statesmen were therefore easy learners.
A century and a quarter has passed since that warning was given, not
to Great Britain only, but to the world; and we to-day see, in the
contrasted colonial systems of the two states, the results, on the one
hand of political aptitude, on the other of political obtuseness and
backwardness, which cannot struggle from the past into the present
until the present in turn has become the past--irreclaimable.

Causes superficially very diverse but essentially the same, in that
they arose from and still depend upon a lack of local political
capacity, have brought the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, in our own
time, to similar conditions, regarded as quantities of interest in the
sphere of international relations. Whatever the intrinsic value of the
two bodies of water, in themselves or in their surroundings, whatever
their present contributions to the prosperity or to the culture of
mankind, their conspicuous characteristics now are their political and
military importance, in the broadest sense, as concerning not only the
countries that border them, but the world at large. Both are land-girt
seas; both are links in a chain of communication between an East and a
West; in both the chain is broken by an isthmus; both