PEOOllESS or CULTIVATION. 
12i 
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 ill the east, it is because barbarous hordes possessed 
themselves of Egypt, Asia Minor, and ot once free 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. Eree and powerful insti- 
tutions, adapted to the interests ot all, remove these dangers ; 
and the growing civilization of the world, the competition of 
labour and of trade, arc not the ruin of states, whoso 
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 
lime the number and wants of consumers. This struggle, 
begun in Spanish America six years after m_v departure, is 
(Iraning gradually to an end. We shall soon see both shores 
ot the Atlantic peopled by independent nations, ruled by 
different forms of Government, but united by the remem- 
brance of a common origin, uniformity ot language, .and the 
wants which civilization creates. It may be said, that the 
immense progress of the art of navigation has contracted 
the bound.aries 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 
t'yrena'ic region. 
