European colonization

“ This meant the opening up of the world to commerce and the extension of European civilization to vast areas formerly peopled by savages or half-civilized peoples. It meant a great outlet for the spirit of enterprise and adventure, relief from over-population, an enormous increase in wealth and power, and a struggle for supremacy among the nations of Europe. Colonization and colonial policy excited immense attention in Europe ”

“ Here, on the contrary, the African part of our population bears so large a proportion to the residue of European origin, as to create the most lively apprehension, especially in some quarters of the Union. ”

“ They were to be seen in their villages; along the public ways; in the midst of our European colonies,—pale, meagre, emaciated, fainting, consumed by famine—some stretched on the ground in expectation of dying; others scarce able to drag themselves on to seek any nourishment, and throwing themselves at the feet of the Europeans, entreating them to take them in as their slaves.
“To this description, which makes humanity shudder, let us add other objects, equally shocking. Let imagination enlarge upon them, if possible. ”

“ It may be affirmed in very positive terms, that if the natives had been in a state of peace, of union and harmony among themselves, and had with one purpose fronted the early European adventurers, giving them no aid and comfort, and resisting their first feeble, forlorn, and impoverished encroachments, both conquest and colonization on this soil would have been long deferred, and when finally accomplished would have been accompanied by very different circumstances, conditions, and results. ”

“ The colonization of territories in the temperate zone by European Governments, separated by vast ocean-spaces from their offshoots, has given origin to new and distinct nations different from the parent stock in modes of thought and in ways of life, a result due mainly, no doubt, to local physical conditions, but in part also, if only in part, to detachment, to complete and actual severance from the mother country. ”

“ In the southern states many of the concessions given to railway companies carried colonization clauses as a continuation of 159the deliberate, thoroughly worked out plan of the authorities by which during the nineteenth century settlements were made of Poles, Russians, Swiss, Germans and other European races, with the object of feeding the lines and stimulating agriculture. The European War has checked these plans: settlers from Europe will in all probability be scarce for many years to come, engaged as the racked countries will be in their own rehabilitation. ”

“ The names of Cortez and Pizarro, Mexico and Peru, are become sounds familiar to all ears—linked together as in a spell of wild wonder, and stand as the very embodiment of all that is marvellous, dazzling, and romantic in history. Here were vast empires, suddenly starting from the veil of ages into the presence of the European world, with the glitter of a golden opulence beyond the very extravagance of Arabian fable; populous as they were affluent; with a new and peculiar civilization; with arts and a literature unborrowed of other realms, and unlike those of any other. ”

“ Commerce on the high seas, the fisheries, freedom of range for those who had been cramped in the Old World, the privilege of trying theories of government and of religion denied them in Europe, and even the opportunities for obtaining abundant subsistence though at the cost of healthful toil, began in the first half century of real colonization to prepare the way for the stupendous development of the continent and for making it the harborage of emigrating Europe. ”

“ In the discussions to which this interest has given rise and in the arrangements by which they may terminate the occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers. ”

“ Christianity has now been in the world upwards of One Thousand Eight Hundred Years. For more than a thousand years the European nations have arrogated to themselves the title of Christian! some of their monarchs, those of most Sacred and most Christian Kings! We have long laid to our souls the flattering unction that we are a civilized and a Christian people. We talk of all other nations in all other quarters of the world, as savages, barbarians, uncivilized. ”

“ In the northerly portion, suitable for agriculture, this was carried on by natives; but their land was confiscated by the Germans, and, as Dr Bönn stated in a reading upon the Colony, "the framework of society is European; very little land is in the hands of natives." ”

“ In those parts of the world which have been settled and not merely conquered by Europeans, and which are still British possessions, in British North America, Australasia, and South Africa, there has been on the whole parity of progress. No one of the three groups of colonies has in wealth and population wholly out-distanced the others. This fact has unquestionably made for strength and permanence in the British Empire, and it is equally beyond question that the spread of colonization within the Empire would have been wanting, had Great Britain retained her old North American colonies. ”

“ We have now followed the Europeans to every region of the globe, and seen them planting colonies, and peopling new lands, and everywhere we have found them the same—a lawless and domineering race, seizing on the earth as if they were the first-born of creation, and having a presumptive right to murder and dispossess all other people. ”

“ They achieved for themselves a more remarkable civil organisation, and acquired a higher degree of influence, than any other race of Indian lineage except those of Mexico and Peru. In the drama of European colonisation they stood, for nearly two centuries, with an unshaken front against the devastations of war, the blighting influence of foreign intercourse, and the still more fatal encroachments of a restless and advancing border population. ”

“ It is shocking that the divine and beneficent religion of Christ should thus have been libelled by base pretenders, and made to stink in the nostrils of all people to whom it ought, and would, have come as the opening of heaven; but it is a fact no less awful than true, that the European nations, while professing Christianity, have made it odious to the heathen. They have branded it by their actions as something breathed up, full of curses and cruelties, from the infernal regions. ”

“ As a fact of history, we know that the former of these systems of relation between Europe and the outlying continents did prevail until the present century. It is not extinct yet. Spain to a considerable degree and France to a less degree still cling to the notion of dependent colonies as things worth having for what the mother country, in antagonism to their own interest and certainly in antagonism to that of any other European nation, can get out of them. ”

“ But the colonizing genius which, with the British Isles as centre, has taken up the “white man’s burden” in all quarters of the globe, is universally recognized. In the problems of government raised by the organization of the British dominions beyond the seas the system of colonization has been developed to an extent unknown under any other national flag. ”

“ In spite of a rapid increase of population, Germany has been backward in establishing trans-marine colonies, while France, with a proportionately smaller increase of population, began by colonising in all directions, but occupied more land than she was able to master; for which reason colonization in the history of France has taken more or less the character of conquest. ”

“ The motives that induce the French to cling, with a tenacity which an immense annual outlay of treasure and human life has hitherto failed to weaken, to their African conquest, are, we believe, pretty well appreciated, at least in this country, where colonies and colonization are understood, and where French policy is studied by many. ”

“ The Spaniards indeed looked with as much amazement on the simple people, and the paradise in which they lived, as the natives did on the wonderful spectacle of European forms, faces, dress, arts, arms, and ships.—Such sweet and flowing streams; such sunny dales, scattered with flowers as gorgeous and beautiful as they were novel; trees covered with a profusion of glorious and aromatic blossoms, and beneath their shade the huts of the natives, of simple reeds or palm-leaves; the stately palms themselves, rearing their lofty heads on the hill sides ”

“ Although the partition of Africa gave the German Empire nearly one million square miles and an obvious opening for colonization and power, the inexperience and ineptitude of German officials in Colonial government, the dislike, also, of Germans for emigration and the fact that the movement of settlers abroad steadily decreased in late years, tended to prevent, on the Continent, an expansion which would have been assured under British colonization and business effort. ”

“ This accordingly suggests a question affecting the whole relations of British and European colonists generally to the native population of new lands settled and colonised by them. Not only English, Scotch, and Irish, but German, Norwegian, Icelandic, French, Polish, Russian, and Italian emigrants flock in thousands to the New World, merge in the common stock, and in the third generation learn to speak of themselves as “Anglo-Saxon!” ”

“ Spain and Portugal still held the greatest colonial dominions upon the earth, France had lost nearly the whole of her colonies, Holland possessed the rich spice islands of the eastern seas, and Great Britain was just entering upon that activity in colonization which forms one of the striking features of nineteenth century progress. ”

“ Early Settlers trading with the Natives.
In the earlier attempts at settlement, after the spirit of conquest and adventure had been somewhat satiated, the object in view, so far as the English were engaged in it, was the acquisition of tributary provinces, and the wealth which they would bring to the parent states. In this line of policy, England but followed the example of Spain and Portugal, yet with far less energy, and with no manner of success. The signal failures that were experienced turned attention, at length, to more sober and rational projects—to regular colonization and commerce. ”

“ A senseless party in that country has advocated the liberation of all her colonies. No policy could be more suicidal. Colonization is as much of a necessity for Great Britain as it was for the Grecian States and for Rome, when they became overcrowded with population. Probably, in the order of nature, colonies, as they reach maturity, may be expected to go off to themselves, but for each colony which thus puts on the toga virilis, Great Britain should establish another, if she would preserve her empire, and her importance with the nations of the earth. ”

“ These rich lands afforded to their new masters useful supplies of raw materials, which were capable of almost indefinite expansion. They included, in East and South-West Africa, areas well suited for white settlement; but German emigrants, despite every encouragement, refused to settle in them. An elaborately scientific system of administration, such as might be expected from the German bureaucracy, was devised for the colonies; officials and soldiers have from the beginning formed a larger proportion of their white population than in any other European possessions. ”

“ Their numbers, of late years, have been rapidly on the decline. It has generally been observed, that where Europeans have colonized, the less civilized nations have always dwindled away, and at length totally disappeared. ”

“ The need of colonies is often put forward as a real and also a legitimate motive for war. Colonies must be provided, they say, for the overflow of population from the [130] homeland; colonies are the foundation of the trade of nations—trade follows the flag. They think of colonies as the offspring of nations, and nations without colonies seem sterile and destined to extinction. We know that Germany's desire for colonies is one of the causes of the European crisis, and that the colonial question has been a fertile cause of trouble in Europe for many years. ”

“ Had the work of colonization here by Great Britain been as brisk and vigorous as that of her own American offspring, we should have seen lively times on the north and northwest of this continent. As it is, from the acknowledgment of our independence to this day, whenever we have had border troubles with the savages, they have invariably found aid and comfort, arms and supplies, from our brethren on the other side of that border. ”

“ The reasoning about the colonies of Great Britain, drawn from the colonies of antiquity,155 is a mere useless display of learning; for the colonies of the Tyrians in Africa, and of the Greeks in Asia, were totally different from our system. No nation before ourselves formed any regular system of colonization, but the Romans; and their system was a military one, and of garrisons placed in the principal towns of the conquered provinces. The States of Holland were not colonies of Spain ”

“ Colonization and commerce, indeed, would naturally become objects of interest to an ingenious and enterprising people, inhabiting a territory closely circumscribed in its limits, and in no small part mountainous and sterile; while the islands of the adjacent seas, and the promontories and coasts of the neighboring continents, by their mere proximity, strongly solicited the excited spirit of emigration. Such was this proximity, in many instances, that the new settlements appeared rather to be the mere extension of population over contiguous territory, than the establishment of distant colonies. ”