ism. The Romans
exterminate the Veians and Carthaginians; they want no colonizing or
commercial rivals. If England rules the sea, and uses its advantage to
create markets where it can buy at the cheapest and sell at the dearest
rates, we can understand its inexpensive sympathy for the people who can
manufacture little and therefore have to import a great deal, who are
thus the natural, disinterested lovers of free trade. It is very easy to
see why England turns red in the Crimea with the effort to lift up that
bag of rags called Turkey, to set it on the overland route to India; one
decayed nation makes a very good buffer to break the shock of natural
competition in the using up of another. It was the constant policy of
Rome to tolerate and patronize the various people in its provinces, to
respect, if not to understand, their religions, and to protect them from
the peculator. She was not so drunk with dominion as not to see that her
own comfort and safety were involved in this bearing to inferior and
half-effete races. On the other hand, England, with far stronger motives
of interest to imitate that policy, disregarding the prophecies of her
best minds, takes no pains to understand, and of course misgoverns and
outrages her poor nebulous Bengalese, and forces the opium which they
cultivate upon the Chinese whom it demoralizes. Is this difference
merely the difference between a pocket in a toga and one in the
trousers? But a nerve from the moral sense does, nevertheless, spread
into _papilloe_ over the surface of the tighter pocket, not entirely
blunted by yellow potations; so that the human as well as financial
advantage of Jamaica emancipation is perceived. Should we expect this
from the nation which undertook the destruction of the Danish fleet
before Copenhagen in 1801, without even the formality of a declaration
of war, on the suspicion that the Dane preferred to sympathize with
France? What moral clamor could have made the selfish exigency of that
act appear more damaging than a coalition of all the fleets of Europe?
Yet plantation fanaticism did not prevent the great act from which we
augured English hatred of a slaveholders' rebellion. Probably the lining
membrane of a pocket may have intermitted accesses of induration:
we must consult circumstances, if we would know what to expect. An
extraordinary vintage or a great fruit year will follow a long series of
scant or average crops; but we can count upon the average.