ssion of the globe.

But, we say it with the gratification of Englishmen, proud of their
country's fame, and still prouder of its principles--that the lead in this
noblest of all human victories, has been clearly taken by England. It is
she who pre-eminently stimulates the voyage, and plants the colony, and
establishes the commerce, and civilizes the people. And all this has been
done in a manner so little due to popular caprice or national ambition, to
the mere will of a sovereign, or the popular thirst of possession, that it
invests the whole process with a sense of unequaled security. Resembling
the work of nature in the simplicity of its growth, it will probably also
resemble the work of nature in the permanence of its existence. It is not
an exotic, fixed in an unsuitable soil by capricions planting; but a seed
self-sown, nurtured by the common air and dews, assimilated to the climate,
and strikig its roots deep in the ground which it has thus, by its own
instincts, chosen. The necessities of British commerce, the urgency of
English protection, and the overflow of British population, have been the
great acting causes of our national efforts; and as those are causes which
regulate themselves, their results are as regular and unshaken, as they
are natural and extensive. But England has also had a higher motive. She
has unquestionably mingled a spirit of benevolence largely with her
general exertions. She has laboured to communicate freedom, law, a feeling
of property, and a consciousness of the moral debt due by man to the Great
Disposer of all, wherever she has had the power in her hands. No people
have ever been the worse for her, and all have been the better, in
proportion to their following her example. Wherever she goes, oppression
decays, the safety of person and property begins to be felt, the sword is
sheathed, the pen and the ploughshare commence alike to reclaim the mental
and the physical soil, and civilization comes, like the dawn, however
slowly advancing, to prepare the heart of the barbarian for the burst of
light, in the rising of Christianity upon his eyes.

The formation of a new route between India and Europe by the Red Sea--a
route, though well known to the ancient world, yet wholly incapable of
adoption by any but an Arab horseman, from the perpetual tumults of the
country--compelled England to look for a resting-place and depot for her
steam-ships at the mouth of the Red Sea. Aden, a desolated po