124 PEOGilESS OF CULTIVATION. 



to unite countries which a jealous policy has long separated. 

 It is the nature of civilization to go forward, without any ten- 

 dency to decline in the spot that gave it birth. Its progress 

 from east to west, from Asia to Europe, proves nothing 

 against this axiom. A clear light loses none of its bril- 

 liancy by being diffused over a wider space. Intellectual 

 cultivation, that fertile source of national wealth, advances 

 by degrees and extends without being displaced. Its 

 movement is not a migration : and though it may seem to 

 be such in the east, it is because barbarous hordes possessed 

 themselves of Egypt. Asia Minor, and of once freo Greece, 

 the forsaken cradle of the civilization of our ancestors. 



The barbarism of nations is the consequence of oppression 

 exercised by internal despotism or foreign conquest ; and it 

 is always accompanied by progressive impoverishment, by a 

 diminution of the public fortune. Free and powerful insti- 

 tutions, adapted to the interests oi all, remove these dangers; 

 and the growing civilization of the world, the competition of 

 Jabour and of trade, are not the ruin ot states, whose 

 welfare flows from a natural source. Productive and com- 

 mercial Europe will profit by the new order of things 

 in Spanish America, as it would profit from events that 

 might put an end to barbarism in Greece, on the north- 

 ern coast of Africa, and in other countries subject to 

 Ottoman tyranny. What most menaces the prosperity ot 

 the ancient continent is the prolongation of those intestine 

 struggles which check production, and diminish at the same 

 time the number and wants of consumers. This struggle, 

 begun in Spanish America six years after my departure, is 

 drawing gradually to an end. We shall soon see both shores 

 of the Atlantic peopled by independent nations, ruled by 

 different forms of Government, but united by the remem- 

 brance of a common origin, uniformity of language, and the 

 wants which civilization creates. It may be said, that the 

 immense progress of the art of navigation has contracted 

 the boundaries of the seas. The Atlantic already assumes 

 the form of a narrow channel, which no more removes the 

 New World from the commercial states of Europe, than the 

 Mediterranean, in the infancy of navigation, removed the 

 Greeks of Peloponnesus from those of Ionia, Sicily, and the 

 Cyrenaic region. 



