Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Productive And Commercial Europe
Will Profit By The New Order Of Things In Spanish America, As It Would
Profit From Events That Might Put An End To Barbarism In Greece, On
The Northern Coast Of Africa And In Other Countries Subject To Ottoman
Tyranny.
What most menaces the prosperity of the ancient continent is
the prolongation of those intestine struggles which check production
and diminish at the same time the number and wants of consumers.
This
struggle, begun in Spanish America six years after my departure, is
drawing gradually to an end. We shall soon see both shores of the
Atlantic peopled by independent nations, ruled by different forms of
Government, but united by the remembrance of a common origin,
uniformity of language, and the wants which civilization creates. It
may be said that the immense progress of the art of navigation has
contracted the boundaries of the seas. The Atlantic already assumes
the form of a narrow channel which no more removes the New World from
the commercial states of Europe, than the Mediterranean, in the
infancy of navigation, removed the Greeks of Peloponnesus from those
of Ionia, Sicily, and the Cyrenaic region.
I have thought it right to enter into these general considerations on
the future connection of the two continents, before tracing the
political sketch of the provinces of Venezuela. These provinces,
governed till 1810 by a captain-general residing at Caracas, are now
united to the old viceroyalty of New Grenada, or Santa Fe, under the
name of the Republic of Columbia.
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