The Winning of the West, Volume One | Page 8

if considered solely by itself. It was the crowning and
greatest achievement of a series of mighty movements, and it must be
taken in connection with them. Its true significance will be lost unless
we grasp, however roughly, the past race-history of the nations who
took part therein.
When, with the voyages of Columbus and his successors, the great
period of extra-European colonization began, various nations strove to
share in the work. Most of them had to plant their colonies in lands
across the sea; Russia alone was by her geographical position enabled
to extend her frontiers by land, and in consequence her comparatively
recent colonization of Siberia bears some resemblance to our own work
in the western United States. The other countries of Europe were forced
to find their outlets for conquest and emigration beyond the ocean, and,
until the colonists had taken firm root in their new homes the mastery
of the seas thus became a matter of vital consequence.
Among the lands beyond the ocean America was the first reached and
the most important. It was conquered by different European races, and
shoals of European settlers were thrust forth upon its shores. These
sometimes displaced and sometimes merely overcame and lived among
the natives. They also, to their own lasting harm, committed a crime
whose shortsighted folly was worse than its guilt, for they brought
hordes of African slaves, whose descendants now form immense
populations in certain portions of the land. Throughout the continent
we therefore find the white, red, and black races in every stage of purity
and intermixture. One result of this great turmoil of conquest and
immigration has been that, in certain parts of America, the lines of
cleavage of race are so far from coinciding with the lines of cleavage of
speech that they run at right angles to them--as in the four communities
of Ontario, Quebec, Havti, and Jamaica.
Each intruding European power, in winning for itself new realms
beyond the seas, had to wage a twofold war, overcoming the original
inhabitants with one hand, and with the other warding off the assaults

of the kindred nations that were bent on the same schemes. Generally
the contests of the latter kind were much the most important. The
victories by which the struggles between the European conquerors
themselves were ended deserve lasting commemoration. Yet,
sometimes, even the most important of them, sweeping though they
were, were in parts less sweeping than they seemed. It would be
impossible to overestimate the far-reaching effects of the overthrow of
the French power in America; but Lower Canada, where the fatal blow
was given, itself suffered nothing but a political conquest, which did
not interfere in the least with the growth of a French state along both
sides of the lower St. Lawrence. In a somewhat similar way Dutch
communities have held their own, and indeed have sprung up in South
Africa.
All the European nations touching on the Atlantic seaboard took part in
the new work, with very varying success; Germany alone, then rent by
many feuds, having no share therein. Portugal founded a single state,
Brazil. The Scandinavian nations did little: their chief colony fell under
the control of the Dutch. The English and the Spaniards were the two
nations to whom the bulk of the new lands fell: the former getting
much the greater portion. The conquests of the Spaniards took place in
the sixteenth century. The West Indies and Mexico, Peru and the
limitless grass plains of what is now the Argentine Confederation,--all
these and the lands lying between them had been conquered and
colonized by the Spaniards before there was a single English settlement
in the New World, and while the fleets of the Catholic king still held
for him the lordship of the ocean. Then the cumbrous Spanish vessels
succumbed to the attacks of the swift war-ships of Holland and
England, and the sun of the Spanish world-dominion set as quickly as it
had risen. Spain at once came to a standstill; it was only here and there
that she even extended her rule over a few neighboring Indian tribes,
while she was utterly unable to take the offensive against the French,
Dutch, and English. But it is a singular thing that these vigorous and
powerful new-comers, who had so quickly put a stop to her further
growth, yet wrested from her very little of what was already hers. They
plundered a great many Spanish cities and captured a great many
Spanish galleons, but they made no great or lasting conquests of
Spanish territory. Their mutual jealousies, and the fear each felt of the

others, were among the main causes of this state of things; and hence it
came about that after the opening of the seventeenth century the wars
they waged against