Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/258

246 continent is one of the most important events which has taken place in the last thousand years. Since the Protestant Reformation, which helped forward the ideas that were the banner of the march, nothing has proved so significant as the westward movement of this swarm of men, not so much coming as driven out from the old close-pent European hive, and then settling down on the new continent.

A few Romano-Celtic Frenchmen had already moored their venturous shallops in the American water, and pitched their military tents in what was else only the great wilderness of North America, roamed over by wild beasts and wild men, also the children of the woods.

The Spanish tribe had come before either, and with military greediness were eating up the wealthy South. But Spain could set only a poor and perishing scion in the new world. That was always an evil tree to graft from, not producing good fruit. Besides, an old nation, in a state of decay, founds no healthy colonies. The children of a decomposing State, time-worn and debauched, though with a whole continent before them—what could they accomplish for mankind? They inherited the idleness, the ferocity, the military avarice, the superstition and heinous cruelty, of a people never remarkable for any high traits of character. Two thousand years ago, the Celto-Iberic tribe mingled with the Roman; then with the Visi-Goth, the Moor, the Jew—war proclaiming the savage nuptials,—and modern Spain is the issue of this six-fold juncture. This composite tribe of men had once some martial vigour; nay, some commercial enterprise, but it has done little to advance mankind by the invention of new ideas, the organization thereof, or the administration of what others devised and organized; the meanest and most cruel of the Christian nations, to-day she seems made but of the leavings of the world. To Columbus, adventurous Italy^s most venturous son, she gave, grudgingly, three miserable ships, wherewith that daring genius sailed through the classic and mediæval darkness which covered the great Atlantic deep, opening to mankind a new world, and new destination therein. No Queen wore ever a diadem so precious as those pearls which Isabella dropped into the Western sea^ a bridal gift where-