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Page 13
The wild enterprises and bloody cruelties of the early buccaneers were
therefore not merely a brutal exhibition of unpitying greed,
indicative of the scum of nations as yet barely emerging from
barbarism. They were this, doubtless, but they were something more. In
the march of events, these early marauders played the same part, in
relation to what was to succeed them, as the rude, unscrupulous,
lawless adventurers who now precede the ruthless march of civilized
man, who swarm over the border, occupy the outposts, and by their
excesses stain the fair fame of the race whose pioneers they are. But,
while thus libels upon and reproaches to the main body, they
nevertheless belong to it, share its essential character, and foretell
its inevitable course. Like driftwood swept forward on the crest of a
torrent, they betoken the approaching flood. So with the celebrated
freebooters of the Spanish Main. Of the same general type,--though
varying greatly in individual characteristics, in breadth of view, and
even in elevation of purpose,--their piratical careers not only
evidenced the local wealth of the scene of their exploits, but
attested the commercial and strategic importance of the position upon
which in fact that wealth depended. The carcass was there, and the
eagles as well as the vultures, the far-sighted as well as the mere
carrion birds of prey, were gathering round it. "The spoil of
Granada," said one of these mercenary chieftains, two centuries ago,
"I count as naught beside the knowledge of the great Lake Nicaragua,
and of the route between the Northern and Southern seas which depends
upon it."
As time passed, the struggle for the mastery inevitably resulted, by a
kind of natural selection, in the growing predominance of the people
of the British Islands, in whom commercial enterprise and political
instinct were blended so happily. The very lawlessness of the period
favored the extension of their power and influence; for it removed
from the free play of a nation's innate faculties the fetters which
are imposed by our present elaborate framework of precedents,
constitutions, and international law. Admirably adapted as these are
to the conservation and regular working of a political system, they
are, nevertheless, however wise, essentially artificial, and hence are
ill adapted to a transition state,--to a period in which order is
evolving out of chaos, where the result is durable exactly in
proportion to the freedom with which the natural forces are allowed to
act, and to reach their own equilibrium without extraneous
interference. Nor are such periods confined to the early days of mere
lawlessness. They recur whenever a crisis is reached in the career of
a nation; when old traditions, accepted maxims, or written
constitutions have been outgrown, in whole or in part; when the time
has come for a people to recognize that the limits imposed upon its
expansion, by the political wisdom of its forefathers, have ceased to
be applicable to its own changed conditions and those of the world.
The question then raised is not whether the constitution, as written,
shall be respected. It is how to reach modifications in the
constitution--and that betimes--so that the genius and awakened
intelligence of the people may be free to act, without violating that
respect for its fundamental law upon which national stability
ultimately depends. It is a curious feature of our current journalism
that it is clear-sighted and prompt to see the unfortunate trammels in
which certain of our religious bodies are held, by the cast-iron
tenets imposed upon them by a past generation, while at the same time
political tenets, similarly ancient, and imposed with a like ignorance
of a future which is our present, are invoked freely to forbid this
nation from extending its power and necessary enterprise into and
beyond the seas, to which on every side it now has attained.
During the critical centuries when Great Britain was passing through
that protracted phase of her history in which, from one of the least
among states, she became, through the power of the sea, the very
keystone and foundation upon which rested the commercial--for a time
even the political--fabric of Europe, the free action of her statesmen
and people was clogged by no uneasy sense that the national genius was
in conflict with artificial, self-imposed restrictions. She plunged
into the brawl of nations that followed the discovery of a new world,
of an unoccupied if not unclaimed inheritance, with a vigor and an
initiative which gained ever-accelerated momentum and power as the
years rolled by. Far and wide, in every sea, through every clime, her
seamen and her colonists spread; but while their political genius and
traditions enabled them, in regions adapted to the physical well-being
of the race, to found self-governing colonies which have developed
into one of the greatest, of free states, they did not find, and never
have found, that the possession of and rule over barbarous, or
semi-civilized, or inert tropical communities, were inconsistent with
the maintenance of political liberty in the mother country. The sturdy
vigor of the broad principle of freedom in the national life is
attested sufficiently by centuries of steady growth, that surest
evidence of robust vitality. But, while conforming in the long run to
the dictates of natural justice, no feeble scrupulosity impeded the
nation's advance to power, by which alone its mission and the law of
its being could be fulfilled. No artificial fetters were forged to
cramp the action of the state, nor was it drugged with political
narcotics to dwarf its growth.
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