The friendship of England, and the moral harmony of the English-speaking world, will perhaps check the progress of American imperialism northward; but the capital which develops and exploits the west of Canada is a competitor which cannot be resisted. Moreover, such men as Goldwin Smith, a moral authority in Canada, counsel union with the great Republican neighbour. Free trade, which the English radicals wish to maintain, relaxes the economic ties which might ensure the duration of the British Empire, and prevents the formation of a _Zollverein_, of that fiscal union between Great Britain and her colonies which was the great project of Chamberlain. It is to guarantee commercial and economic {391} interests that Canada is approaching the United States and withdrawing from England. Mexico, where £100,000,000 of American capital is invested; Panama, a republic subjected to the protectorate of the Anglo-Saxon North; the Canal Zone, which the Yankees have acquired as a remote southern possession; the Antilles, which they are gradually absorbing; Central America, where ever turbulent republics tolerate pacificatory intervention; and Canada, rich and autonomous, form, for the statesmen of Washington and the Yellow Press, a great and desirable empire. In two centuries the small Puritan colonies of the Atlantic seaboard will perhaps have come to govern the continent from the Pole to the Tropics; and will create, with the aid of all the races of mankind, a new Anglo-Saxon humanity, industrial and democratic. Thus the Roman Republic, from her narrow home between the Apennines, governed the world, as did Great Britain, peopled by a tenacious race, the sea. To check the advance of the United States the South will lack a political force of the same weight. The conflict between the united Americans of the North and the divided inhabitants of the South will necessarily terminate fatally for the Latin New World. The Pacific will be the theatre of racial wars and vast and transforming emigrations. Once the canal is open it is extremely probable that European emigrants will descend in large numbers upon the seaboard of Western America. Brazil and the Argentine attract the modern adventurer; their Eldorado is in the Argentine plains or the forests of Brazil. Venezuela, invaded by emigrants of Germanic race, will be born again; a dense population will fill her valleys, and Caracas will become a great Latin city. But in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, there is a great lack of centres of civilisation in the {392} interior, and the sierra is largely wild and unpeopled; all progress is in the small towns of the coast, set amidst the aridity of the desert. Chinese and Japanese, who are content with low wages, are crushing the European worker by their competition. Japanese colonies will people the American West from Panama to Chili, and in these new countries the fusion of Japanese and Indian blood is by no means impossible.