Page:The History of San Martin (1893).djvu/38

6 "Any opposition which may be made to the independence of the New World may cause suffering but will not imperil the idea."

Thus, much before the final triumph, the emancipation of the new continent was accepted as an accomplished fact, and the attitude of the United States supported by England turned the scales of diplomacy in its favour in 1823. When at the Congress of Verona the party of reaction proposed a contrary policy, Canning, Prime Minister of Great Britain, wrote to Grenville those memorable words which re-echoed through two hemispheres:—

"The battle has been fierce, but it is won. The nail is clenched; Spanish America is free. Novus sæclorum nascitur ordo!"

The battle of Ayacucho was the response to these words, and Canning could then exclaim:—

"I have called a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old."

The land discovered by Christopher Columbus, which completed the physical world, was destined to re-establish its general equilibrium at the moment the base thereof was shaken.

Before the end of the fifteenth century Europe had lost its moral and political equilibrium. After the invasion of the barbarians, which imbued it with a new principle of life without destroying the germ of decay left by the fall of the Roman Empire, its civilization was again on the point of collapse. Not one homogeneous nation there existed, her productive energy was exhausted, liberty was but a latent hope, privilege was the dominant law, politics were founded on the principles of Macchiavelli, all healthy evolution in the path of progress was impossible.