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The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 - From Discovery of America October 12, 1492 to Battle of Lexington April 19, 1775 by Julian Hawthorne
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plotted by geographers; it must be a string of islands, or at best but an
attenuated outlying bulwark of the East. News spread slowly in those days;
Vasco da Gama had reached India round the Cape of Good Hope before
Balboa's exploit; Columbus, on his third voyage, had touched the mainland
of South America, and young Sebastian Cabot, sailing from Bristol under
the English flag, had driven his prow against Labrador ice in his effort
to force a northwest passage; and still the truth was not fully realized.
And when, a century later, the English colonies were assigned their
boundaries, these were defined north, south and east, but to the west they
extended without limit. Panama was but thirty miles across, and no one
imagined that three thousand miles of solid land stretched between the
Chesapeake and the Bay of San Francisco. Then, as now, orthodoxy fought
against the heresy that there could be anything that was not as narrow as
itself.

And this physical denial or belittlement of the American continent had
its mental complement in the failure to comprehend the destiny of the
people which was to inhabit it. Spain thought only of material and
theological aggrandizements: of getting gold, and converting heathen, to
her own temporal and spiritual glory; and she was as ready to shed
innocent blood in the latter cause as in the former. England, without her
rival's religious bigotry, was as intent upon winning wealth through
territorial and commercial usurpations. Though not a few of the actual
discoverers and explorers were generous, magnanimous and kindly men,
having in view an honorable renown, based on opening new fields of life
and prosperity to future ages, yet the monarchs and the trading Companies
that stood behind them exhibited an unvarying selfishness and greed. The
new world was to them a field for plunder only. Each aimed to own it all,
and to monopolize its produce. The priestly missionaries of the Roman
Catholic faith did indeed pursue their ends with a self-sacrifice and
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