with pride on account of the great extension already gained by their country, believing themselves the absolute arbiters of the destinies of the Americas, and viewing with disdain the old nations of Europe, to which they owe everything, from their population to their freedom, they seriously thought of putting into practice the theory of “manifest destiny” and of making the starry banner float from the Niagara and the Saint Lawrence to Panama.
The Mexican enterprise, which had resulted so favorably for them, was the school in which were educated many of the adventurers, who afterward gave themselves to filibustering, and the example which many others, who through more than a decade disturbed Latin-American countries, set before themselves for imitation. The government in Washington, which observed this tendency with singular pleasure, while publicly reprobating, in secret nourished and aided it.
During Polk’s administration, the government itself had given an exhibition of the ends which it pursued, proposing to Spain to purchase the Island of Cuba at the price of one hundred million dollars, a proposition which that nation did not choose to entertain. This was but the prelude to the aggressive policy which the people of the United States adopted in their relations with other nations, even attempting to mix themselves in European affairs.
The revolution of Hungary and the efforts of Louis Kossuth met an echo in the United States, and matters were carried even to the point of proposing to aid the Hungarian agitator and his partisans to liberate that country from Austrian domination; it was necessary for Francis Joseph’s government to assume a vigorous attitude and for the nations of Europe to show dissatisfaction before these plans were abandoned, and Kossuth, instead of aid, received only a refuge in the United States.
The island of Cuba was, and yet is, too valuable a prize to escape the eyes of the rapacious Yankees; underhandedly they aided Narciso López to