an exotic, fixed in an unsuitable soil by capricions planting; but a seed
self-sown, nurtured by the common air and dews, assimilated to the climate,
and strikig its roots deep in the ground which it has thus, by its own
instincts, chosen. The necessities of British commerce, the urgency of
English protection, and the overflow of British population, have been the
great acting causes of our national efforts; and as those are causes which
regulate themselves, their results are as regular and unshaken, as they
are natural and extensive. But England has also had a higher motive. She
has unquestionably mingled a spirit of benevolence largely with her
general exertions. She has laboured to communicate freedom, law, a feeling
of property, and a consciousness of the moral debt due by man to the Great
Disposer of all, wherever she has had the power in her hands. No people
have ever been the worse for her, and all have been the better, in
proportion to their following her example. Wherever she goes, oppression
decays, the safety of person and property begins to be felt, the sword is
sheathed, the pen and the ploughshare commence alike to reclaim the mental
and the physical soil, and civilization comes, like the dawn, however
slowly advancing, to prepare the heart of the barbarian for the burst of
light, in the rising of Christianity upon his eyes.

The formation of a new route between India and Europe by the Red Sea--a
route, though well known to the ancient world, yet wholly incapable of
adoption by any but an Arab horseman, from the perpetual tumults of the
country--compelled England to look for a resting-place and depot for her
steam-ships at the mouth of the Red Sea. Aden, a desolated port, was the
spot fixed on; and the steam-vessels touching there were enabled to
prepare themselves for the continuance of their voyage. We shall
subsequently see how strikingly British protection has changed the
desolateness of this corner of the Arab wilderness, how extensively it has
become a place of commerce, and how effectually it will yet furnish the