1833.] 
POLITICAL. 
475 
United States, and every requisite arrangement was made at Cal- 
lao for our departure. Peru was unsettled, and the afifiicted 
Equador was convulsed with revolution. The Fairfield was de- 
spatched to Guayaquil to protect our trade, and the Dolphin, now 
commanded by Lieutenant-commandant Vorheese, was stationed at 
Callao for the protection of American interests in that quarter, 
while we took our final leave of Peru, and arrived at Valparaiso 
on Monday, the sixteenth of December. 
The Potomac had now been fourteen months on the coast, ac- 
• tively employed wherever our commercial interests seemed to re- 
quire her presence. She had boarded, on the station, seventy-one 
American vessels, amounting to nearly twenty thousand tons of 
shipping, and manned by eleven hundred men. In all the ports, 
the commodore had held official intercourse with the authorities ; 
preserving throughout a strict national character, impressing on the 
minds of all, that the United States wished for peace and recip- 
rocal commerce with her sister republics of the south. 
A word on the political condition and prospects of these coun- 
tries, and a word only can be given at a moment like the present, 
when home is on every tongue, until the very Potomac herself 
almost indicates her impatience of delay. The true condition of 
these countries, it appears to us, has of late been but too gener- 
ally misunderstood, and, by superficial observers, but too fre- 
\ quently misrepresented. We allude to the opinion becoming 
prevalent, that these people are unfit for free institutions and self- 
; government ; and their frequent disturbances are referred to as 
conclusive evidence in support of this opinion. 
; Now we not only maintain that this opinion is unjust, and un- 
founded in truth ; impolitic, so far as it shall mislead the people 
of the United States, and render our government less watchful 
of what is going on in these countries ; where, by-the-by, every 
thing is not always turned to the best account ; — but, that the 
very reverse of the proposition is true — viz., that these people, 
notwithstanding all their internal convulsions, are nevertheless 
working out their political salvation, and that they will ultimately 
succeed in the consolidation of their liberty. 
Did not the people of these countries, immediately on achieving 
their independence, establish governments the most free ? — adopt- 
ing, almost without an exception, the very spirit, and often the 
