The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
MEXICO / CONDITIONS AND PROSPECTS
Mexico, where we learn from you that men of science are not wanting,
may revolutionize itself under better auspices than the Southern
provinces. These last, I fear, must end in military despotisms. The
different castes of their inhabitants, their mutual hatreds and
jealousies, their profound ignorance and bigotry, will be played off
by cunning leaders, and each be made the instrument of enslaving the
others. But of all this you can best judge, for in truth we have
little knowledge of them to be depended on, but through you. But in
whatever governments they end they will be America~ governments, no
longer to be involved in the never-ceasing broils of Europe. The
European nations constitute a separate division of the globe; their
localities make them part of a distinct system; they have a set of
interests of their own in which it is our business never to engage
ourselves. America has a hemisphere to itself. It must have its
separate system of interests, which must not be subordinated to those
of Europe. The insulated state in which nature has placed the American
continent, should so far avail it that no spark of war kindled in the
other quarters of the globe should be wafted across the wide oceans
which separate us from them.
to Alexander von Humboldt, 6 December 1813
|