THE NELSON EXAMINER. Wednesday, December 24, 1856.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume XV, Issue 77, 24 December 1856, Page 2

THE NELSON EXAMINER. Wednesday, December 24, 1856.

Journali become more necessary as men become more equal and individualism more to be feared. It would be to underrate their importance to suppose that they serve only to secure liberty: they maintain civilization. D* TocauEViLi.it, Of Democracy in America, vol. r.,p. 230.

That Democracy — in the ordinary sense of the word, " the shadow of the world " through which we are to " sweep into the younger day " — is so little recognizable as a shadow at all, is we suppose a necessary condition of that development. Were it to cease, while yet its apparent shape is only crescent, to seem a burning and a shining light, the guide and polestar of the nations, it might be doubtful whether the full-orbed glory of its fictitious or fickle splendour was ever destined to mark the fulfilment of one of the great periods of the progress of the human race — one of the phases of its mysterious advance. The mock Sun would be acknowledged to be only one of the flitting night-phantoms, the Aurora Borealis illuminations, produced by the magnetic storms of thought and feeling and opinion, through which the World is rolling onwards to the perfect Day. And the premature recognition of its true character would, we suppose, put a speedy end to its existence, and be the signal for the introduction of the new phase to follow it. Not that we deny its possible present uses, or are blind to its bright side, or its superiority in some respects to much that has gone before it. Not that we are prepared to assert that it is not a necessary (at all events an inevitable) stage in our journey onwards. Only wo (lo not think it to be, in any fair or proper construction of the term, a true and lasting lighl ; the perennial Sun of mankind's political or social millenium, the finished ideal of the organization of any portion of the race for the purposes of government and public or private well-being.

A correspondent, however, whose letter we publish to-day, has taken the trouble to remind us of the existence of the United States of America (a fact we were not indeed very likely to overlook), and famished us with an eulogimn on that great country, from which we gather that he, at all events, has no doubt or misgiving as to the perfection of Democracy in any shape, or its power of conferring unmixed and unlimited benefits on mankind.

Now, in all he says of the rapid strides America (to adopt that magnificent piece of insolence by which we are accustomed to give

that name to the United States, and to ignore the very existence in that vast continent of any races but our own), the wonderful advance ( America has made in all external and material prosperity, we cordially concur. As a whole it certainly dwarfs and diminishes all that the world has hitherto seen in anything like an equal extent of time. In everything that mere enterprise and industry united to intelligence can do, in all that the inspiration of the Dollar can animate men to undertake and accomplish, our transatlantic kinsmen are perhaps unrivalled. The zeal of the counting-house hath eaten them up. In all sincerity we acknowledge and admire their grand energies, the gigantic might with which they tame and subject to their own use the brute forces, so to speak, of Nature. Nay, we give them credit, too, for a daring and freedom, an honesty and earnestness in the discussion, the bringing into practical operation and the working out in actual life of many religious, moral, or social questions, which we think may often put Englishmen to the blush, and which they would do well to imitate.

Our correspondent enumerates some of the resources of the country. But this we scarcely think demands special wonder. It is our very habit of looking upon the United States as the one country of a single nation that makes us dwell on its natural resources. Who thinks of enumerating the resources of Europe ? The " United States " form a vast continent, and have continental resources accordingly. It is Europe on a larger seale — a country formed to maintain perhaps 500 millions of people. That Providence has bestowed upon it every kind of mineral and vegetable wealth, the means of producing almost everything valuable to man, need not excite our special wonder. And that into this vast country the pouring of the most industrious and enterprising race that ever appeared on the Earth should have produced effects never before experienced, seems also a natural consequence; and well may we English exult that it was reserved for our little island to people the enormous continent. For indeed the future possible prospects of this our race do almost overwhelm even a sober imagination. When we consider that the Americans (we must use the magniloquent term, for the only other one we know, the "Yankees," is both ludicrous and incorrect) since their three millions at the Revolution have increased to 26 millions (we believe this is under the true number), and that at the rate of their past increase they double their population every twenty-five years; when we consider what comparatively feeble, indolent, sluggish races of mixed, degenerate Spaniards or Portuguese and Indians occupy the rest of North America, and nearly all South America — races sunk in ignorance and superstition and all kinds of mental thraldom — comparatively small in numbers, and scarcely if at all increasing — it is really hardly possible to avoid the conclusion, that the progeny of glorious " Jonathan " is destined to overrun them all. The great Anglo-Saxon race may very possibly absorb all these scattered, heterogeneous relics and fragments of races into its own — rolling over and swallowing them like an advancing ocean, whose waters their petty streams can hardly tinge or discolour with any peculiarities of their own. Westward and southward must the glorious ocean roll, swallowing up all the turbulent, petty, wrangling mock-republics it encounters in its way. And we confess we do not feel very much inclined to look upon their possible and probable fate with any very mawkish commiseration. Do not their paltry and perpetual revolutions, and janglings, and dictatorships, set up and spun down again immediately, strike one as a less dignified and promising repetition of what Milton — in his incomplete history of England, speaking of the mixed tribes of Danes, Picts, Jutes, old British Celts, &c, that for so many centuries were working up and fermenting into that glorious result, the English race — calls " a pitiful flocking and fighting of kites and crows?" What if the Transatlantic English race overrun and subjugate the races previously and unworthily inhabiting the American continent, just as their and our Saxon and Norman forefathers overrode and supplanted their own predecessors, whose hot-headed ferocity and turbulence prevented their opening up and using the wealth of all kinds that lay dormant about and- beneath them in that infant England? Need any philanthropist mourn i.or whimper? Whatever is sound and masIculine and durable in those races will 1 | assuredly last and be amalgamated with the new overriding race, as the sturdy stuff that entered into the composition of those old Danes and Celts still exists in our English composition, and crops out occasionally no doubt through the Norman or Saxon strata that overlay it. Nothing much worth keeping ,is ever lost. But we do not wish to advocate "filibustering" and piracy — we only say that if it happen that the Government or No-Go-vernment established in the States be too weak to prevent these irruptions and invasions, we could find philosophy enough in our nature to bear the results with resignation. For eventually we believe the conquered races will be better and happier for their conquest. And we may be pretty sure there are difficulties enough in the way before the conquest is made, not the least those that may arise from the very Democtapy whose weakness as a form of

Government gives opportunities and occasions for the original outbreaks and invasions, but at the same time by the internal dissensions and discords that seem natural to it, may render the invading people too weak to follow up their designs with any constancy, vigour, or unanimity. So that there are doubts enough after all about the event to excuse our indulging in the contemplation of it. So the image we wish to call up to the minds of our readers is, the far from new, but very glorious one, of a mighty race spreading from Labrador to Chili, from Brazil to California, ultimately of one blood, speak u,^ the same language, obeying the same fundamental laws of sober freedom, inspired and elevated by the same literature, and that the magnificent one reigned over by a Shakspeare and Milton. Well, all this may be in the future ; and the coldest imagination, the dryest speculator that ever champed the chopped straw of statistics, can hardly avoid being led to it as a possible conclusion.

We have been drawn on perhaps further than was necessary into these reflections by the desire to show that in what we have to say we are actuated by no narrow prejudice against the United States; that we labour under no inability to appreciate or sympathize with the peculiar elements, features, and facts of their greatness. For we think it may be shown that their form of government has not very much to do with these great results — and that these last do not at all necessarily preclude cr render impossible many present and perhaps more future evils attendant upon, if not produced by, the democratic form of government. But this we must reserve for aziother occasion ; only hoping that our correspondent, and those -a ho like him — and we believe they are many — turn to America as an example and a guide to ourselves in the working and improving of our Constitution, will look still more narrowly and further below the surface, and assure themselves that they sufficiently discriminate between such circumstances as are the roots and causes of others, and such as are only the occasions or concomitants of the latter, before forming any unalterable opinion upon the subject.