GENERAL SUEVET. 7 



port of SamaïKi, one of the most important strategical harbours in tropical America. 

 But the opposition of the northern states, and to some extent that of the European 

 powers, prevented the realisation of their projects, which had for primary aim the 

 political supremacy of the slave-holding landowners. The only West Indian land 

 belonging de f ado, if not to the States, at least to an American trading company 

 is Navaza (Navassa), a rock covered with a deposit of guano, off the west coast of 

 Haiti. As soon as the deposit is exhausted the useless islet will be abandoned as 

 several others have already been by the same company. 



On the mainland the aspirations of the all-powerful republic have been more 

 abundantly satisfied than in the Antilles, and more than half of the territory 

 formerly belonging to New Spain, that is to say, Texas, California, New Mexico 

 and Arizona, henceforth forms an integral portion of the northern confederacy. 

 Negotiations have also been entered into for the purchase of the right of free 

 transit, in other words, of real sovereignty in the isthmus of Tehuantepec. 



Moreover, some filibustering expeditions, not officially sanctioned, but encour- 

 aged in every way by irresponsible agents, were undertaken in the Central American 

 republics, at the time when the rush w^as made from New York and the New 

 England states to the Calif ornian " Eldorado." In virtue of the same law by which 

 riverain populations gravitate towards the mouths of the streams on which they 

 dwell, the Americans claimed as belonging to them by " manifest destiny " the 

 shortest route which at that period connected their settlements on both oceanic 

 slopes. But if their essays in this direction proved abortive, they at all events suc- 

 ceeded in thwarting the English, who, like themselves, were anxious to command the 

 shortest interoceanic highways, and for this purpose had occupied the Bay Islands, 

 near the Honduras coast, the so-called " Kingdom " of Mosquitia, a natural de- 

 pendency of Nicaragua, and even the j)ort of Greytown at the mouth of the Lake 

 Nicaragua emissary. 



Then came the construction of the transcontinental railways in United States 

 territory itself, and this, combined with the energetic resistance of the Hispano- 

 American populations, postponed, at least for a time, the accomplishment of the 

 national aspirations for political ascendency in the Central American States. 



Since the epoch that followed the discovery of the Californian goldfields the 

 independence of the Central American republics has not again been threatened by 

 the United States. But the Washington Government has steadily pursued a 

 policy calculated to prevent European influence from replacing their own, and at 

 the time of Maximilian's accession to the throne of Mexico they co-operated by 

 their diplomatic action w4th the efforts of the natives to recover their autonomy. 



At present all the mainland of Central America, British Honduras alone 

 excepted, is constituted in independent political states. Even in the archipelagoes 

 held by the European powers, one large island is divided between two sovereign 

 nations, the San Domingans, a mixed Hispano-Negro people of Spanish speech, 

 and the Haitians, of African descent and French speech. 



Altogether the insular world presents a marked contrast with the neighbour- 

 ing mainland, not only in its political status, but also in the original elements of 



