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294 independence and the practice of free institutions would lift those populations out of their ignorance, superstition, and sloth, and develop in them the moral qualities of true freemen. He had battled for their cause, and clung to his hopes even against the light of better information. He had infused some of his enthusiasm into Mr. Adams himself, although the cooler judgment of the President, even in his warmest recommendations to Congress, always kept the contingency of failure in view. Clay had seen his gorgeous conception of a grand brotherhood of free peoples on American soil almost realized, as he thought, by the convocation of the Panama Council. Then the pleasing picture vanished. He was obliged to admit to himself that in the conversation of 1821, concerning the southern republics, Adams, after all, had been right; that free government cannot be established by mere revolutionary decrees; that written constitutions, in order to last, must embody the ways of thinking and the character of the people; that the people of the thirteen North American colonies (to whom revolution and national independence meant not the creation of freedom, but the maintenance of liberties already possessed, enjoyed, and practiced, the defense of principles which had been to them like mother's milk) were an essentially different people from the Spanish Americans, who had grown up under despotic rule, to whom liberty was a new thing they did not know what to do with, and who lived mostly in a tropical climate where the suste-