Page:The crater; or, Vulcan's peak.djvu/307

 OR, VULCAN S PEAK. 67 nation burns towns, and destroys their people in thousands, because their governors will not consent to admit a poison ous drug into their territories; an offence against the laws of trade that can only be expiated by the ruthless march of the conqueror. Yet the ruling men of both these com munities affect a great sensibility when the long-slumbering young lion of the West rouses himself in his lair, after twenty years of forbearance, and stretches out a paw in resentment for outrages that no other nation, conscious of his strength, would have endured for as many months, be cause, forsooth, he is the young lion of the West. Never mind : by the time New Zealand and Tahiti are brought under the yoke, the Californians may be admitted to an equal participation in the rights of American citizens. The governor was fully aware of the danger he ran of having claims, of some sort or other, set up to his islands, if he revealed their existence ; and he took the greatest pains to conceal the fact. The arrival of the Rancocus was mentioned in the papers, as a matter of course; but it was in a way to induce the reader to suppose she had met with her accident in the midst of a naked reef, and princi pally through the loss of her men ; and that, when a few of the last were regained, the voyage was successfully re sumed and terminated. In that day, the great discovery had not been made that men were merely incidents of newspapers ; but the world had the folly to believe that newspapers were incidents of society, and were subject to its rules and interests. Some respect was paid to private rights, and the reign of gossip had not commenced.* of which might rebuke this spirit of gossip, and give a salutary warning to certain managers of the press, who no sooner hear a rumour than they think themselves justified in embalming it among the other truths of their daily sheets. The occurrences of life brought us in collision, legally, with an editor; and we obtained a verdict against him. Dissatisfied with defeat, as is apt to be the case, he applied for a new trial. Such an application was to be sustained by affidavits, and he made his own, as usual. Now, in this affidavit, our competitor swore distinctly and unequivocally to certain alleged facts (we think to the number of six), every one of which was untrue. Fortunately for the party implicated, the L
 * We hold in our possession a curious document, the publication