IX. POLITICAL PORTRAITS WITH PEN AND PENCIL.............................................70 We intend publishing from time to time sketches, (with portraits) of the distinguish- BRITISH AGGRESSION IN CENTRAL AMERICA. THE Mosquito question is yet unsettled. The basis of the settlement, as far as the present imperfect arrangement is entitled to the name, is disgraceful to American statesmanship, or indicative of American treachery, in the sentiments of the officials to whose hands the fate, fortunes and honor of the republic are committed. That there is abundant evidence of contemptible incapacity and ignorance, or of criminal indifference to the highest interests of the Union, in the late halting, and truckling, and crooked diplomacy of the Government, will sufficiently appear from a recapitulation of its leading facts. These we mean to submit to the people of the States in their sovereign capacity. But as the question, now more immediately in issue, is of a correlative character; and as it moreover involves important considerations, historical, statistical, juridical and international, it is indispensable to present to our readers a condensed resumé of the successive aggressions by which England has acquired her present foothold in Mosquito, Balize and Costa Rica, whereby she assumes the control and protectorship of the great projected "highway of nations," and dictates such modifications of a treaty between the United States and the republic of Nicaragua as may suit her own haughty pretensions. It seems to be no longer agitated, whether she shall continue to protect the squalid nationality of some few hundred illegitimate sava ges, born of indiscriminate concubinage, and leprous from a commixture of every impure blood, to whom she alternately administers crowns, Christianity and Jamaica rum; or whether she shall, by her agents, inflame international strife between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, or maintain her fraudulent hold of Belize; but whether she shall not dictate the terms of an international treaty, solemnly sanctioned by the Government of Nicaragua and our own. The former questions would seem to be only incidental now, and entitled to review as ancillary to the hold which Britain has obtained, and by which she justifies her insulting pretensions. But, considered even in that view, it will be seen that every one of them comes within the range of the future action and decision of the republic, unless she shall be so far betrayed as to abdicate her functions of Govern ment, and confer on an English plenipotentiary the power to ratify or reject her treaties of amity and commerce with other American nations. For it is scarcely concealed that Mr. Bulwer's object, in seeking to modify the terms of the Nicaragua treaty, is to justify his Government in giving a construction to the Clayton treaty, which no American of any party would accept when that treaty was ratified. We now proceed with our historical sketch. Nicaragua was discovered by Columbus, and taken possession of by him in the name of the crown of Spain. It is a singular fact, that this possession was formally taken of the Atlantic coast; and the extension of the settlement to the shores of the Pacific was only an assertion of the right acquired by the title claimed over the now disputed territory of Mosquito. Local advantages determined the choice of the settlers, but the right over the whole country remained undivided and indisputable. The claim of England to Virginia was not more settled or sacred than that of Spain to Central America, from shore to shore. England's assertion now is, that the Mosquito country was always free; that the Indians of the coast never recognized the authority of Spain. No doubt they did not; and if the recognition of the Indians be requisite, what valid title to one spot of the American continent is in existence? Either the assertion of Lord Palmerston is a wilful falsehood, or the title of England to Canada and Oregon is a fraudulent usurpation. Discovery is the only title to land in America, as between the different European nations. This doctrine has been solemnly affirmed by courts of justice, recognized in international treaties, and sanctioned by all European Governments. Upon it rests the claim of those Governments to the sovereign dominion of the discovered countries, subject only to the bare occupancy of the Indians. How far the denial of their rights was a usurpation, this is not the place to discuss. But be it robbery or justice, it was a common bond between the nations of Europe. An able judge, pre-eminent in learning, and distinguished for an everlasting attachment to the British constitution, thus enumerates it : "The different nations of Europe claimed and exercised the power to grant the soil while yet in possession of the natives. *** That right never has been doubted, and any attempt of others to intrude, would be considered an aggression which would justify war."* When Lord Palmerston denies this, which he daringly does, he not alone controverts the solemn decision of a great jurist, but questions the constitution of his country, and falsifies her sovereign claim to the colonies she has lost, and those she has preserved. But in this case a broader fraud was needful, and Lord Palmerston is not the man to stumble at it. He not only had to trample on the law, and the rights of other nations, but on the pledged faith and honor of his own. Of the dominion of Spain over the Mosquito territory, here is his Lordship's emphatic repudiation: "But I deny totally and entirely that Spain had any right to the Mosquito territory. On the contrary, the King of the Mosquitos has, from a very early period in the history of America, been an independent ruler of a separate territory, and he has been invariably upheld and acknowledged by the Government of Great Britain." Chief Justice Marshall, in Johnson vs. McIntosh, 8 Wheaton. His lordship innocently professes his ignorance of the time and manner in which Mosquito land associated itself with the destiny of England. Hear what he says: "At what time, and in what manner, the connection between Great Britain and the MOSQUITO NATION first began, is not well known; but it is certain, and on record, that while the Duke of Albemarle was Governor of Jamaica, the Mosquito Indians made a formal cession of the sovereignty of their country to the King of England; and that, in consequence of that cession, the Chief of the Mosquitos received his appointment as KING, by a commission given him by the Governor of Jamaica, in the name and on behalf of the King of England." This statement is confused, and confused evidently by design. His lordship's aim is two-fold. He desires to base English pretensions on a remote fact, the date of which he purposely involves in obscurity; and lest it may turn out untrue, or appear a swindle, or be denied as utterly invalid and preposterous, he takes shelter in what is called "prescription." But these different claims conflict, and not only contradict one another, but contradict the indefinite allegation in the above denial of Spanish dominion. If the idea conveyed in the allegation-" that there was, from the earliest history of America, a Mosquito King upheld and recognized by Great Britain"-be true, then the king-making of the Duke of Albemarle must be regarded by Lord Palmerston himself as a juggle. If, on the other hand, that performance was genuine, however patent an absurdity, then the idea of a prescriptive state and monarch, was an impudent and wilful fabrication. The assumption that the connection commenced in times of which there is no record, and the story of the king-making, cannot both be true; one or other must be untrue. We scarcely think his lordship believed either. He used both in the hope that two lies, like two negatives, would destroy one another. If his lordship spoke of the character of the connection instead of its commencement, he could be more precise. That the intercourse was illicit, in the most degrading and damnable sense of the word, there is sufficient historical testimony. It was the intercourse of lawless, buccaneers with savage prostitutes. From that intercourse has sprung Lord Palmerston's "Mosquito Nation," worthy of a designation in capitals in his diplomatic note. Having tested his lordship's position by himself, let us now test them by the solemn acts of his government and nation. But first we give one brief extract to establish the actual relation that existed between England and the Mosquito Territory. We quote from a Dutch pirate who wrote in 1670: "The Kings of Spain have on several occasions sent their Ambassadors to the Kings of England to complain of the molestations and troubles these pirates have caused on the coasts of America, even in the calm of peace. It hath always been answered "That such men did not commit these acts as subjects of his Majesty, and that therefore his Catholic Majesty might proceed against them as he should think proper, and it was adjoyned that the King of England never gave any commission to those of Jamaica to commit hostilities against the subjects of his Catholic majesty."" |