THE PEDALTO INSTITUTION FOR INCORPORATED ART

 
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DEPARTMENT OF WAR REENACTMENT ANTAGONISM

DIRECTOR   Olen Sluss

ABOUT

Trained in the school of Democracy,.! am a believer in the "manifest destiny" of my country. Having regarded the acquisition by Mr. Jefferson of the Louisiana territory as wise and beneficent, though unwarranted by the Constitution, beholding great advantages in the acquisition of Florida, and having believed that, without war, could we have patiently waited, Texas would have come to us naturally as a State or States of the Union, I am used to dreaming of the just influence the United States are to exercise, from end to end of the American continent. Among the most ephemeral products of our era will be the Franco-Austrian empire in Mexico, if we be but true to our own principles in this season of doubt and perplexity. Our infidelity to principles alone can give it perpetuity. Within its limits the question of color is not a political or asocial question; it is purely one of taste. There, as in Central and South America, the colored man is a freeman. And we are to determine whether the sympathies of these millions of people within our own borders are to be with the Government whose supremacy they have aided in reestablishing or with the wily and ambitious man who will pledge them citizenship on condition that they aid him in carrying the limits of his Latin empire to the northern boundary of the GulfStat.es of America. To them the United States or Mexico will be the exemplar nation of the world. Before her ruder lawsall men are equal. Let ours be not less broad and just. The tropical and malarious regions of Central America have, during the prevalence of slavery, seemed to be the natural geographical boundary of our influence in that direction. Tropical regions are not the home of the white man. They were not made for him. God did not adapt him to them. They are prolific in wealth, invite to commercial intercourse, yield many things necessary to the success of our arts and industry, and will one day afford a market for immense masses of our productions. But we cannot occupy them; we cannot develop their resources. Nor can the negro, in the ignorance and degradation to which we have hitherto doomed him. We have at length made him a soldier, and if need be he will carry our arms and our flag triumphantly over that to us pestilential region; and, if we make him a citizen; open to his children the school-house; give him theprivilegeof the workshop, the studio, the hall of science jcidmit him to the delights and inspirations of literature, philosophy, poetry—-in brief, if we recognize him as a man and open to him the broad fields of American enterprise and culture, he will see that nature has given him the monopoly of the wealth of that region, and will bless the world by making himself the master of it. By this means,and this alone, can we extend our influence over that region, and prepare for the ultimate Americanization of those drained by the'Orinoko, the Amazon, and the Parana.