Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/27

14 in America, In 1627 only two, Jamestown and Plymouth. But the Spanish colonies date back to 1493. Compare the history of the basin of the Amazon with the valley of the Mississippi. The Amazon, with its affluents, commands seventy thousand miles' of internal navigation, draining more arable land than all Europe contains, the largest, the most fertile valley in the wond. It includes 1,796,000 square miles. Everything which £nds a home on earth will flourish in the basin of the Amazon, between the level of the Atlantic and the top of the Andes. But the tonnage on the Amazon does not probably equal the tonnage on Lake Champlain. Only an Anglo-Saxon steamer ruffles the waters of the Amazon. Parsi, at its mouth, more than three hundred years old, contains less than 20,000 inhabitants.

The Mississippi with its tributaries drains 982,000 square miles, and affords 16,694 miles of steam navigation. In 1851 there were 1190 steamboats on its bosom, measuring 249,054 tons, running at an annual cost of $39,774,194; the value of the merchandise carried on the river in 1862 was estimated at $432,651,240, more than double the whole foreign trade of the United States for that year. New Orleans, at the mouth of the Mississippi, was founded in 1719, and in 1850 contained 119,461 inhabitants: in 1810 it had not 18,000!

The Anglo-Saxon colonists brought with them the vigorous bodies and sturdy intellect of their race; the forms of representative and constitutional government; publicity of political transactions; trial by jury; a fondness for local self-government; an aversion to centralization ; the Protestant form of religion; the Bible; the right of private judgment; their national administrative power; and that stalwart self-reKance and thrift which mark the Englishman and American wherever they go. New Spain had priests and soldiers; New England ministers and schoolmasters. In two centuries, behold what consequences come of such causes! No Chilian vessel ever went to Spain!

But America itself is not unitary; there is a Spanish America in the United States. Unity of idea and interest by no means prevails here.

America was settled by two very different classes of men, one animated by moral or religious motives, coming to