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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And though it may seem to be such in the
east, it is because barbarous hordes possessed themselves of Egypt,
Asia Minor, and of once free Greece, the forsaken cradle of the
civilization of our ancestors.
The barbarism of nations is the consequence of oppression exercised by
internal despotism or foreign conquest; and it is always accompanied
by progressive impoverishment, by a diminution of the public fortune.
Free and powerful institutions, adapted to the interests of all,
remove these dangers; and the growing civilization of the world, the
competition of labour and of trade, are not the ruin of states whose
welfare flows from a natural source. 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. I will not anticipate the
description which I shall have hereafter to give of New Grenada; but,
in order to render my observations on the statistics of Venezuela more
useful to those who would judge of the political importance of the
country and the advantages it may offer to the trade of Europe, even
in its present unadvanced state of cultivation, I will describe the
United Provinces of Venezuela in their relations with Cundinamarca, or
New Grenada, and as forming part of the new state of Columbia. M.
Bonpland and I passed nearly three years in the country which now
forms the territory of the republic of Columbia; sixteen months in
Venezuela and eighteen in New Grenada. We crossed the territory in its
whole extent; on one hand from the mountains of Paria as far as
Esmeralda on the Upper Orinoco, and San Carlo del Rio Negro, situated
near the frontiers of Brazil; and on the other, from Rio Sinu and
Carthagena as far as the snowy summits of Quito, the port of Guayaquil
on the coast of the Pacific, and the banks of the Amazon in the
province of Jaen de Bracamoros.
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