Mexico and Its Religion: With Incidents of Travel in That Country During Parts of the Years 1851-52-53-54, and Historical Notices of Events Connected With Places VisitedWilson, Robert Anderson
Religion
Mexico and Its Religion: With Incidents of Travel in That Country During Parts of the Years 1851-52-53-54, and Historical Notices of Events Connected With Places Visited
Wilson, Robert Anderson
Mexico -- Description and travel; Mexico -- Religion
"The English, of whom John Cabot was a compatriot, came by the northern
route [to America], and discovered an immense country, whose rivers are
the grandest, whose forests appear to be antediluvian, whose lakes
would be called seas in Europe; with harbors on an extensive coast
which rival the greatest in the world. It has a soil suited to every
purpose of agriculture. In short, it has facilities for all
enterprises, and for raising the material of a productive commerce
sufficient to establish advantageous relations with the Old World, and
for creating an independent society; for supplying its necessities; for
making its condition enviable; for rivaling the power, the influence,
and the destinies of its parent country.
"The country which they discovered they found scarcely inhabited,
although here and there wandered some tribes without social
organization, without government, without the power of concentration,
even to the extent which numbers give to savages. They [the colonists]
early learned that they could establish their dominion without
resistance, and that they could extend it as far as they could open the
country with the ax of the active colonist, who considered himself the
heir of undiscovered wealth, which would result from an inevitable
destiny. The colonies which were established along the coast, and those
which were formed in the interior, increased, as increases the gentle
rill in its onward course by uniting with other rills and with rivers,
until, becoming one vast torrent, it precipitates itself into the
ocean. The colonies of Tyre, of Carthage, or Rome were never comparable
with the Anglo-American colonies, who appropriated to themselves, in
less than a century, regions more extended than the half of Europe.
"The observer of the providential destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race in
America notices that the emancipation of the thirteen American
colonies, which constituted so many states and an independent nation,
instead of being the result of the alleged political grievances, was
rather the impulsive force of expansion, which encountered insuperable
obstacles while the states were colonies subordinate to a European
nation. They were retarded in their advances by relations and
compromises with other nations. The Anglo-Saxon, when translated to the
wilds of America, needed only a stopping-place in order to found a
peculiar and exclusive polity, which should enable him to march ever
onward in his aggressions and usurping institutions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account