luric or
Uranic principles, no doubt with great accuracy 'between Portugal
and Spain,'--was proprietor of all those Seas and Continents. And now
England, in the interim, by Decree of the Eternal Destinies, had clearly
come to have property there, too; and to be practically much concerned
in that theoretic question of the Pope's Meridian. There was no
reconciling of theory with fact. 'Ours indisputably,' said Spain, with
loud articulate voice; 'Holiness the Pope made it ours!'--while fact
and the English, by Decree of the Eternal Destinies, had been grumbling
inarticulately the other way, for almost two hundred years past, and no
result had.

"In Oliver Cromwell's time, it used to be said, 'With Spain, in Europe,
there may be peace or war; but between the Tropics it is always war.'
A state of things well recognized by Oliver, and acted on, according
to his opportunities. No settlement was had in Oliver's brief time;
nor could any be got since, when it was becoming yearly more pressing.
Bucaniers, desperate naval gentlemen living on BOUCAN, or hung beef;
who are also called Flibustiers (FLIBUTIERS, 'Freebooters,' in French
pronunciation, which is since grown strangely into FILIBUSTERS,
Fillibustiers, and other mad forms, in the Yankee Newspapers now
current): readers have heard of those dumb methods of protest. Dumb and
furious; which could bring no settlement; but which did astonish the
Pope's Decree, slashing it with cutlasses and sea-cannon, in that
manner, and circuitously forwarded a settlement. Settlement was becoming
yearly more needful: and, ever since the Treaty of Utrecht especially,
there had been an incessant haggle going on, to produce one; without the
least effect hitherto. What embassyings, bargainings, bargain-breakings;
what galloping of estafettes; acres of diplomatic paper, now fallen
to the spiders, who always privately were the real owners! Not in
the Treaty of Utrecht, not in the Congresses of Cambray, of Soissons,
Convention of Pardo, by Ripperda, Horace Walpole, or the wagging of
wigs, could this matter be settled at all. Near two hundred years of
chronic misery;--and had there been, under any of those wigs, a
Head capable of reading the Heavenly Mandates, with heart capable of
following them, the misery might have been briefly ended, by a direct
method. With what immense saving in all kinds, compared with the oblique
method gone upon! In quantity of bloodshed needed, of money, of idle
talk and es