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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It May Also Be Observed That The Importance Of The
Geographical Divisions Of Spanish America, Founded At The Same Time
On
the relations of local position and the habits of several centuries,
have prevented the mother-country from retarding the
Separation of the
colonies by attempting to establish Spanish princes in the New World.
In order to rule such vast possessions it would have been requisite to
form six or seven centres of government; and that multiplicity of
centres was hostile to the establishment of new dynasties at the
period when they might still have been salutary to the mother country.
Bacon somewhere observes that it would be happy if nations would
always follow the example of time, the greatest of all innovators, but
who acts calmly and almost without being perceived. This happiness
does not belong to colonies when they reach the critical juncture of
emancipation; and least of all to Spanish America, engaged in the
struggle at first not to obtain complete independence, but to escape
from a foreign yoke. May these party agitations be succeeded by a
lasting tranquillity! May the germ of civil discord, disseminated
during three centuries to secure the dominion of the mother-country,
gradually perish; and may productive and commercial Europe be
convinced that to perpetuate the political agitations of the New World
would be to impoverish herself by diminishing the consumption of her
productions and losing a market which already yields more than seventy
millions of piastres. Many years must no doubt elapse before seventeen
millions of inhabitants, spread over a surface one-fifth greater than
the whole of Europe, will have found a stable equilibrium in governing
themselves.
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