What has been the condition of the countries under consideration? In 1839, the entire population of the tropical American isthmus, in the states of central America and New Grenada did not exceed three millions. The number of the inhabitants of pure European descent did not exceed one hundred thousand. It was only among this inconsiderable fraction that anything like wealth, intelligence, and enterprise, akin to that of Europe, was to be found; the rest were poor and ignorant aboriginals and mixed races, in a state of scarcely demi-civilisation. Throughout this thinly-peopled and poverty-stricken region, there was neither law nor government. In Stephens’s ‘Central America,’ may be found an amusing account of a hunt after a government, by a luckless American diplomatist, who had been sent to seek for one in central America. A night wanderer running through bog and brake after a will-o’-the-wisp could not have encountered more perils, or in search of a more impalpable phantom. In short, there was nobody to trade with. To the south of the Isthmus, along the Pacific coast of America, there was only one station to which merchants could resort with any fair prospect of gain—Valparaiso. Except Chili, all the Pacific states of South America were retrograding from a very imperfect civilisation, under a succession of petty and aimless revolutions. To the north of the Isthmus matters were little, if anything, better. Mexico had gone backwards from the time of its revolution; and, at the best, its commerce in the Pacific had been confined to a yearly ship between Acapulco and the Philippines. Throughout California and Oregon, with the exception of a few European and half-breed members, there were none but savage aboriginal tribes. The Russian settlements in the far north had nothing but a paltry trade in furs with Kamschatka, that barely defrayed its own expenses. Neither was there any encouragement to make a short cut to the innumerable islands of the Pacific. The whole of Polynesia lay outside of the pale of civilisation. In Tahiti, the Sandwich group, and the northern peninsula of New Zealand, missionaries had barely sowed the first seeds of morals and enlightenment. The limited commerce of China and the Eastern Archipelago was engrossed by Europe, and took the route of the Cape of Good Hope, with the exception of a few annual vessels that traded from the sea-board States of the North American Union to Valparaiso and Canton. The wool of New South Wales was but coming into notice, and found its way to England alone round the Cape of Good Hope. An American fleet of whalers scoured the Pacific, and adventurers of the same nation carried on a desultory and inconsiderable traffic in hides with California, in tortoise-shell and mother of pearl with the Polynesian Islands.