But now that this ancient division and conflict of the spiritual and the temporal powers is in these enlightened times a bygone thing, and in the older sense is extinct forever--since it seems mankind can not do without antagonism of some kind, we have, instead of it, an elementary one between land and water. A political schism variously manifests itself between the ocean and the continent. In fact, that great Island Kingdom which traverses and rules the ocean, and by founding colonies and settlements wherever it listeth or thinketh profitable, puts forth, as it were, the feelers of universal dominion, is properly an empire of the sea. For in contradistinction from a kingdom we may call every monarchy an empire which comprises in itself several other peoples and nations of divers races and political constitutions. In such a sense we have contrasted this maritime empire with the Continent. But although experience has shown the possibility of such a division of the whole world and political alienation of the two elements of land and water throughout the globe, it has also established a conviction that though these two divisions might do incalculable injury and mischief to each other, no permanent or decided supremacy of either would follow, inasmuch as a medium for maintaining the dependence of either is wanting. And as it is only in some urgent need of the times to find some counterpoise to absolute power, or an apprehension of it, that a dynamical state or the tendency to it finds its justification, so it was only during the transient reign of a despotic lust of conquest, and as a check to it, that this maritime power could have risen so high as it has in the opinion of the Continental states.