Having now quitted North America, let us sail southward. There we may direct our course east or west, we may pass Cape Horn, or the Cape of Good Hope, and enter the Pacific or the Indian Ocean, secure that on whatever shore we may touch, whether on continent or island, we shall find the Europeans oppressing the natives on their own soil, or having exterminated them, occupying their place. We shall find our own countrymen more than all others widely diffused and actively employed in the work of expulsion, moral corruption, and destruction of the aboriginal tribes. We talk of the atrocities of the Spaniards, of the deeds of Cortez and Pizarro, as though they were things of an ancient date, things gone by, things of the dark old days; and seem never for a moment to suspect that these dark old days were not a whit more shocking than our own, or that our countrymen, protestant Englishmen of 1838, can be compared for a moment to the Red-Cross Knights of Mexican and Peruvian butcheries. If they cannot be compared, I blush to say that it is because our infamy and crimes are even more wholesale and inhuman than theirs. Do the good people of England, who “sit at home at ease,” who build so many churches and chapels, and flock to them in such numbers,—who spend about 170,000_l._ annually on Bibles, and more than half a million annually in missions and other modes of civilizing and christianizing the heathen, and therefore naturally flatter themselves that they are rapidly bringing all the world to the true faith; do they or can they know that at this very moment, wherever their Bibles go, and wherever their missionaries are labouring, their own government and their own countrymen are as industriously labouring also, to scatter the most awful corruption of morals and principles amongst the simple natives of all, to us, new countries? that they are introducing diseases more pestilent than the plague, more loathsome than the charnel-house itself, and more deadly than the simoom of the tropical deserts, that levels all before it? Do they know, that even where their missionaries, like the prophets of old, have gone before the armies of God, putting the terrors of heathenism to flight, making a safe path through the heart of the most dreadful deserts; dividing the very waters, and levelling the old mountains of separation and of difficulty— By Faith supported and by Freedom led, A fruitful field amid the desert making, And dwell secure where kings and priests were quaking, And taught the waste to yield them wine and bread.—_Pringle._