Now, it is a difficult condition to find out that spot on a map which should realise both expectations. Happily, however, M. Van de Weyer had to deal with a kind and confiding people, whose knowledge of geography is about equal to a blind man's appreciation of scarlet or sky-blue. Not only, therefore, did he represent to one party, the newly-acquired possession as an island, and to the other as a vast continent, but he actually shifted its locale about the globe, from the tropics to the north-pole, with such admirable dexterity, that not only is all cavil silenced about its commercial advantages, but its very climate has an advocate in every taste, and an admirer in every household. Steam-engines, therefore, are fabricated; cannon are cast; railroads are in preparation; broadcloth is weaving; flax is growing; lace is in progress, all through the kingdom, for the new colony of Guatemala,--whose only inhabitants are little grateful for the profound solicitude they are exciting, inasmuch as, being but rats and sea-gulls, their modes of living and thinking give them a happy indifference about steam-travelling, and the use of fine linen.
No matter;--the country is prospering--shares are rising--speculations are rife--loans are effected every day in the week, and M. Van de Weyer sleeps in the peaceful composure of a man who knows in his heart, that even if they get their unwieldy craft to sea, there is not a man in the kingdom who could, by any ingenuity, discover the whereabout of the far-famed Guatemala.
Lord Chesterfield once remarked that a thoroughly vulgar man could not speak the most common-place word, nor perform the most ordinary act, without imparting to the one and the other a portion of his own inborn vulgarity. And exactly so is it with the Yankees; not a question can arise, no matter how great its importance, nor how trivial its bearings, upon which, the moment they express an opinion, they do not completely invest with their own native coarseness, insolence, and vulgarity. The boundary question was made a matter of violent invective and ruffian abuse; the right of search was treated with the same powers of ribaldry towards England; and now we have these amiable and enlightened citizens defending the wholesale piracy of British authors, not on the plausible but unjust pretext of the benefit to be derived from an extended acquaintance with English literature; but, only conceive! because, if "English authors were invested with any control over the republication of their own books, it would be no longer possible for American editors to alter and adapt them as they do now to the American taste." However incredible this may seem, the passage formed part of a document actually submitted to congress, and favourably received by that body. This is not the place for me to dwell on the unprincipled usurpation by which men who have contributed nothing to the production of a work, assume the power of reaping its benefits, and profiting by its success. The wholesale robbery of English authors has been of late well and ably exposed. The gifted and accomplished author of "Darnley" and "The Gipsy" has devoted his time and his talents to the subject; and although the world at large have few sympathies with the wrongs of those who live to please them, yet the day is not distant when the rights of a large and influential body, who stamp the age with the image of their own minds, can be no longer neglected, and the security of literary property must become at least as great as of mining scrip, or the shares in a rail-road.