The English policy is as old as the time of Elizabeth, and sprang immediately from the contests of that sovereign with Philip the Second. The privateers, in the habit of plundering the towns of the Spanish main, were the first fruits of the policy. England, shut out from a large portion of America by the jealous colonial regulations of Spain, sought to make profit out of these countries by the double means of buccaneering and of contraband trade. This system continued during the whole time of the Spanish dominion on the continent; and traces of it yet remain in the settlements at Balize—named after the freebooter and smuggler Wallis—and in the relations of England to the Indians on the Mosquito shore. The object of the policy was not to acquire colonies, but to acquire trade; hence the wood-cutters at Balize were not colonists, but mere floating settlers, with a right to cut mahogany and dye-woods, yet without the right to organize for themselves a society or a government. And in the same manner it was sought to raise the roving tribes of the Mosquito shore into a community claiming, as did the wood-choppers at Balize, the protection of the British crown. The settlers at Balize, and the Indians and Zambos of the Mosquito shore, might be called, in one of the elegant cant phrases of the day, “squatter sovereigns.” When the Spanish colonies declared their independence, the relations between Spain and England were vastly different from what they had been in the time of Elizabeth; and the Peninsula, just emerging from the struggle with Napoleon, supposed her alliance with Great Britain would secure the neutrality of her old rival in the contest between herself and her rebellious subjects. But England, true to her traditional policy, favored by all possible means the independence of the colonies. British arms, British soldiers, and British counsels, were freely furnished to several Spanish-American States, and their independence was speedily acknowledged by the British crown. Then British merchants flocked to the new fields opened to their enterprise, and organized everywhere the old system of the buccaneers and smugglers. They found the new governments fit tools of their system. Open and general bribery of custom-house officers supplanted, it is true, the plain and less corrupt smuggling of former times, and British men-of-war, sent to collect British claims for advances made to revolutionary governments at most usurious rates, took the place of the old buccaneers; but in reality the substance of things was the same as before.