which to subjugate a whole country, overthrow its institutions, and impose upon it, by force of arms, a foreign despot, is a still deeper crime against God and humanity. Americans will make a very perilous mistake if they fail to regard this armed occupation of a sister Republic as any thing less than one important part of the scheme for the hoped-for subjugation of the United States. The invasion of Mexico and the rebellion are the two grand features of this French and English plot; and, while England has devoted her energies more particularly to protecting and aiding our home-conspirators, France has been equally busy with her allotted share in the attempt to dismember the Republic, and reconquer America. It is a blow at our national life, and in defense of that life we are bound to use all honorable means which may be at our disposal. It is aimed by the monarchies of Western Europe against free institutions on this continent; it is aimed by the Pa pacy against our Protestant faith; it is aimed at our commerce with Asia through excluding us from the Isthmus and Central America, and with the ultimate intention of wresting from us our possessions on the Pacific, and our whole mineral territory, which Louis Napoleon has surveyed and mapped out already. So far back as 1847, the French Emperor unfolded his plan for the occupation of the Isthmus of Panama and Central America, and for a ship-canal between the oceans, for the purpose of planting a European power in the center of the continent to check our southward progress and control the American route to India. England, having changed her views since the time of Canning, and fearing the rapid growth of the Republic, adopted his, and hence her operations in Central America, and also her approval of the attack on Mexico. Whatever may be the external aspect or attitude of these two powers, their purposes remain unchanged; they are perfectly agreed as to their American policy, and, until the relations of Europe are materially changed, we can count with certainty upon their covert or open hostility. To permit France, under such circumstances, to obtain a firm foot hold on our Southern border, would be nothing less than national suicide. In warning Americans against the establishment or the strengthening of the Papal power on this continent, one explanation should be made. No true American will object to a Church of the Catholic form in this country—a Church which should be one among others, one of the religious denominations merely, and on a level with the rest. With the religious belief of any man, or with his mode of worship, Americans propose not to interfere. But it is quite another thing to stretch over this continent, and over this Republic, the power of that politico-ecclesiastical despotism called the Papacy, of which Louis Napoleon is one head and the Pope the other-of which the Jesuits are the inspiring soul, and French and other Latin armies and navies are to be the executive powers. Could Europe and America, as France and the Jesuits design, be brought under the control of the Papacy again, it would bring upon the world a more fearful despotism, a bitterer curse than it felt under Hildebrand and the Innocents. Let Americans consider this subject in its relations to our Pacific States, and our commerce with Asia. The Isthmus will soon be the great transit-point over which the Asiatic trade of the Americas and a part of Europe must go, and every rule of national safety demands that this route should be under the control of an American power. With Mexico, Central America, and Cuba permanently in the hands of European powers, they could doom us to a second-rate position in spite of our every effort. They could control, to suit themselves, the commerce of the world, and absorb its wealth. Besides, the nations of Europe have their own home-routes to Asia. France is preparing, in union with England, to cross Suez with the ship-canal now nearly finished. Russia is extending her lines from the Black Sea, by the Caspian and the Aral, while she also proposes to divert a part of the trade of Asia up the Amoor, and cross the continent by railroad and water to Moscow. Surely, then, this American route belongs to Americans; and to permit any European power to hold our own keys of Asia would be to sink from the position of a power among nations. Let England and France confine themselves within their appropriate limits, and then, in the natural course of events, by peaceful growth and fair contract, we shall obtain, in due time, whatever we require. Their officious, arrogant, and hostile interference will not be endured, unless we are either blind to our most important interests or have lost the spirit of our fathers. The sun is not more certain to rise than that France, in possession of Mexico and Central America, would, with the help of England, exclude us from the routes of the Isthmus, and this would first destroy our participation in the commerce of the East, and then, with the Pacific ports of Mexico and Central America in the hands of a hostile power, what could save California, connected with us only by the Cape or two thousand miles of railway? Viewed from any point, the movement of France involves the question of life or death for this Republic. Let us thank God that just in the hour of our need and peril he has provided for us the means of defense. Before the war we should have seen no method by which such an attack as Europe now threatens could have been resisted, in the face of their overwhelming navies. They could have sealed up our whole coast, burned our cities, and landed any number of troops safely under cover of their fleets. But the revolution which we have wrought in naval warfare, by our Monitors and improved artillery, has changed all this. Our harbors can not now be entered, our cities can not be burned, no fleet can maintain its position here for the landing of troops, or for blockading our coast. No vessels that can cross the ocean can withstand batteries and ships that we can prepare for home defense, and these ships on the coast of Mexico, and such an army as we can easily place there, would soon solve the question of European occupation; and then, when Europe has been taught that these Americas are the rightful and exclusive domain of Americans, the theater for an American civilization, which will brook no foreign dictation, the United States, as the leader of a grand alliance of American States, may present to all nations the type and model of a Christian Republic, while Russia, let us hope, will exhibit to Europe and the East, a Christian monarchy and a national Church administered so as to bless, instruct, and elevate the people. If so, America and Russia will be the two great powers of the future. CHAPTER XLI. CONCLUSION. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ERA UPON WHICH WE ARE ENTERING: THE ERA ALTHOUGH the whole movement of society may be regarded as a progress from a definite starting point toward a definite end, yet this movement is so marked off into divisions, stages in the grand march, that we are able to see where one great system ends and another begins. There is hardly room for doubt that the nations are just now standing at the close of a political era, just at the beginning of one of those revolutions in which old institutions, having lived beyond their time, either silently crumble or are shattered by violence and swept away, and the world enters upon the life of a new age; and the spirit of that age embodies itself in new forms of social, political, and perhaps religious life. At such periods the powers which have ruled the world through an age, and which have controlled and divided among them its authority, its honors, and emoluments, struggle desperately to maintain their position. The wealth, the power, the rank, the religious institutions, in short the external forces of society, are at first all at their disposal, and these for a time are used to force back the coming age, to trample out the light of new truth, to perpetuate the old abuses, and retain the vanishing past. |