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Page 51
The Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, taken together, form an
inland sea and an archipelago. They too have known those mutabilities
of fortune which receive illustration alike in the history of
countries and in the lives of individuals. The first scene of
discovery and of conquest in the New World, these twin sheets of
water, with their islands and their mainlands, became for many
generations, and nearly to our own time, a veritable El Dorado,--a
land where the least of labor, on the part of its new possessors,
rendered the largest and richest returns. The bounty of nature, and
the ease with which climatic conditions, aided by the unwarlike
character of most of the natives, adapted themselves to the
institution of slavery, insured the cheap and abundant production of
articles which, when once enjoyed, men found indispensable, as they
already had the silks and spices of the East. In Mexico and in Peru
were realized also, in degree, the actual gold-mine sought by the
avarice of the earlier Spanish explorers; while a short though
difficult tropical journey brought the treasures of the west coast
across the Isthmus to the shores of the broad ocean, nature's great
highway, which washed at once the shores of Old and of New Spain. From
the Caribbean, Great Britain, although her rivals had anticipated her
in the possession of the largest and richest districts, derived nearly
twenty-five per cent of her commerce, during the strenuous period when
the Mediterranean contributed but two per cent.
But over these fair regions too passed the blight, not of despotism
merely, for despotism was characteristic of the times, but of a
despotism which found no counteractive, no element of future
deliverance, in the temperament or in the political capacities of the
people over whom it ruled. Elizabeth, as far as she dared, was a
despot; Philip II. was a despot; but there was already manifest in her
subjects, while there was not in his, a will and a power not merely to
resist oppression, but to organize freedom. This will and this power,
after gaining many partial victories by the way, culminated once for
all in the American Revolution. Great Britain has never forgotten the
lesson then taught; for it was one she herself had been teaching for
centuries, and her people and statesmen were therefore easy learners.
A century and a quarter has passed since that warning was given, not
to Great Britain only, but to the world; and we to-day see, in the
contrasted colonial systems of the two states, the results, on the one
hand of political aptitude, on the other of political obtuseness and
backwardness, which cannot struggle from the past into the present
until the present in turn has become the past--irreclaimable.
Causes superficially very diverse but essentially the same, in that
they arose from and still depend upon a lack of local political
capacity, have brought the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, in our own
time, to similar conditions, regarded as quantities of interest in the
sphere of international relations. Whatever the intrinsic value of the
two bodies of water, in themselves or in their surroundings, whatever
their present contributions to the prosperity or to the culture of
mankind, their conspicuous characteristics now are their political and
military importance, in the broadest sense, as concerning not only the
countries that border them, but the world at large. Both are land-girt
seas; both are links in a chain of communication between an East and a
West; in both the chain is broken by an isthmus; both are of
contracted extent when compared with great oceans, and, in consequence
of these common features, both present in an intensified form the
advantages and the limitations, political and military, which
condition the influence of sea power. This conclusion is notably true
of the Mediterranean, as is shown by its history. It is even more
forcibly true of the Caribbean, partly because the contour of its
shores does not, as in the Mediterranean peninsulas, thrust the power
of the land so far and so sustainedly into the sea; partly because,
from historical antecedents already alluded to, in the character of
the first colonists, and from the shortness of the time the ground has
been in civilized occupation, there does not exist in the Caribbean or
in the Gulf of Mexico--apart from the United States--any land power at
all comparable with those great Continental states of Europe whose
strength lies in their armies far more than in their navies. So far as
national inclinations, as distinct from the cautious actions of
statesmen, can be discerned, in the Mediterranean at present the Sea
Powers, Great Britain, France, and Italy, are opposed to the Land
Powers, Germany, Austria, and Russia; and the latter dominate action.
It cannot be so, in any near future, in the Caribbean. As affirmed in
a previous paper, the Caribbean is pre-eminently the domain of sea
power. It is in this point of view--the military or naval--that it is
now to be considered. Its political importance will be assumed, as
recognized by our forefathers, and enforced upon our own attention by
the sudden apprehensions awakened within the last two years.
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