Page 89 - The Interest of America in Sea Power Present and Future

7o The Isthmus and Sea Power.

tures, the far-sighted as well as the mere car-
rion birds of prey, were gathering round it.
" The spoil of Granada," said one of these mer-
cenary chieftains, two centuries ago, " I count
as naught beside the knowledge of the great
Lake Nicaragua, and of the route between the
Northern and Southern seas which depends
upon it."
As time passed, the struggle for the mastery
inevitably resulted, by a kind of natural selec-
tion, in the growing predominance of the peo-
ple of the British Islands, in whom commercial
enterprise and political instinct were blended
so happily. The very lawlessness of the period
favored the extension of their power and influ-
ence; for it removed from the free play of a
nation's innate faculties the fetters which are
imposed by our present elaborate framework of
precedents, constitutions, and international law.
Admirably adapted as these are to the con-
servation and regular working of a political
system, they are, nevertheless, however wise,
essentially artificial, and hence are ill adapted
to a transition state, — to a period in which
order is evolving out of chaos, where the result
is durable exactly in proportion to the freedom