STATE OF VENEZUELA. 121 



mense resources which the people of both North and South 

 America might derive from their own position and their rela- 

 tions with commercial Europe and Asia, one of those great 

 revolutions which from time to time agitate the human race, 

 has changed the state of society in the vast regions through 

 which I travelled. The continental part ot the New World 

 is at present in some sort divided between three nations of 

 European origin; one (and that the most powerful) is of 

 Germanic race : the two others belong by their language, 

 their literature, and their manners to Latin Europe. Those 

 parts of the old world which advance farthest westward, the 

 Spanish Peninsula and the British Islands, are those of 

 which the colonies are most extensive; but four thousand 

 leagues of coast, inhabited solely by the descendants of 

 Spaniards and Portuguese, attest the superiority which in 

 the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the peninsular nations 

 had acquired, by their maritime expeditions, over the navi- 

 gators ot other countries. It may be fairly asserted that 

 their languages, which prevail from California to the Rio de 

 la Plata, and along the back of the Cordilleras, as well as in 

 the forests of the Amazon, are monuments of national glory 

 that will survive every political revolution. 



The inhabitants of Spanish and Portuguese America form 

 together a population twice as numerous as the inhabitants 



Mulish race. The French, Dutch, and Danish posses- 

 sions of the new continent are of small extent ; but, to com- 

 plete the general view of the nations which may influence 

 the destiny of the other hemisphere, we ought not to forget 

 the colonists of Scandinavian origin, who are endeavour- 

 ing to form settlements from the peninsula of Alashka as far 

 as California ; and the free Africans of Hayti, who have 

 verified the prediction made by the Milanese traveller Benzoni 

 in 1545. The situation of these Africans in an island more 

 than three times the size ot Sicily, in the middle of the "West 

 Indian Mediterranean, augments their political importance. 



y friend of humanity prays for the development of the 

 civilization which is advancing in so calm and unexpected a 

 manner. As yet Russian America is less like an agricultural 

 colony than the factories established by Europeans on the 

 coast of Africa, to the great misfortune ol the natives ; they 

 contain only military posts, stations of fishermen, and 



