CHAPTER I. A NEW NATION.
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ULTIMA THULE.
CHAPTER I.
A NEW NATION.
1. Influences of a new country.
A NEW country ought to produce new thoughts. Not only does it commence a new chapter in the book of the world, but it actually gives a new form and a new connection to the life and dealings of before-existing nations.
A new country introduces a new element perhaps, but, at the very least, a new item into all former calculations. It is a change, but it is generally more. It is often the introduction of specific difference besides and beyond mere addition.
Even the discovery of a new region exercises a vast influence upon the old world; much more, then, the birth and beginnings of a people. It is a new step on the floor--a fresh life sent from Heaven--a repetition of the greatest miracle on the greatest scale.
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2. Creation and renovation.
As an act of creation, it is wonderful; as an act of renovation and reformation, it is more than wonderful, for it touches the deep sympathies and affections of mankind.
The early commonwealths of the world may be regarded with simple awe as so many direct acts of creation. How plainly this appears in the beginnings of the nations of Moses and Lycurgus! "The Lord said unto Moses" argues direct and immediate influence. And the speech of the Oracle to Lycurgus associates him with the Divine Powers:
"Thou art come, Lycurgus, to my stately bounteous shrine,
Dear to highest Heaven, dear to all the Powers Divine:
God or man, I know not how thy destiny to read,
Which thou art; but let me rather count thee God indeed."
But when the new nation is grafted upon the material stock of a colony, the wonder of the Promethean spark seems smaller. It appears to wane out of observation before another light--a light borrowed from some older community. This last leads us back towards ordinary life; and, as the wonder lessens, the other passions grow. We now glory in the new nation, as being the work of men like ourselves; forgetting that we can never be more than instruments and auxiliaries of some higher will.
In the first, God awakes life through a hero; in the second, He transmits it by means of some
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more ordinary machinery. The two greatest rising nations of the day are examples.
Russia first became possessed of a soul through the great work of the Czar Peter. America, on the other hand, has been gradually made out of England, without the decided preponderating energies of any single man. For as to Washington, we can very easily imagine America without him; but can any one imagine Russia without Peter?
Whenever a nation arises, there is evidently a desire and an effort of Nature to cast and form afresh the rude mass of mankind; but where a nation arises under charge of another, proceeding from its side, Nature is attempting to recast and reform some work which she deems too valuable to fling aside, until it has produced its like. In this attempt the most extraordinary combinations take place--strong affinities, strong antipathies. The likeness between the old and the new nation may be wonderful, the contrast no less so. Their connection is in itself a study. They assist each other and struggle together alternately. We see all this in its perfection in Graham's or Bancroft's "History of the United States of America." There we may read of the States in their earliest infancy; nay, in Lucas's collection of Charters, we may study the construction of their cradles--how the first constitutions began to be made.
In New Zealand, as it stands at present, we are permitted to behold the earliest beginnings
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of a new national life; we are invited to gaze upon this unfolding vision; nay, we are specially called upon to contemplate it, descending, as it does, upon a province or colony of our own. Not only our love of knowledge, of speculation, of comparison, is appealed to, but our desires, interests, ambitions are touched. We must feel that we have a stake in the future nation; that in our present protectorship, duties and expectations go hand in hand.
The possession of a great colony is like a pledge of a new life. There we may renew ourselves. For as a colony derives much of its strength and light from the history, tradition, language, laws, and feelings of the mother-country, so she may reasonably look for and obtain a filial benefit from her offspring in return for her nursing care. The contests with which we are so sadly familiar in our old country, may be, under more propitious circumstances, successfully fought out on a new soil. Dangers which never can be escaped, obstacles which can never be surmounted here, may have no existence there. New faculties may be bestowed upon us; fresh energy radiated from the inventive and constructive genius of a young society, as yet unbent by conventionalities, unbroken by excess.
Virgil, in his great political poem, has accordingly married the two interests. "Antiquam exquirete matrem" is the direction given to the scarce weaned Dardan emigrant. And if the great
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arts of life, religion, economy, government, stand in a peculiar relation to the beginning and early development of a nation, they also in their new forms produce a certain reaction upon the customs and ways of the old-fashioned world.
In a new country we may avoid our old national mistakes, and escape their retribution. Behold a clean new conscience. Here we may reap the great blessing of experience, without being any longer bowed down by the overwhelming debt of its purchase.
To no other colony does all this so forcibly apply as to the latest-born and farthest distant. No other presents a resemblance and a contrast to England so strong as New Zealand. What an empire it is which can contain the two: what an immense opportunity for mutual good exists in their relationship: what a dreadful possibility of evil!
