— and when his power was ended, they all started up again. The Spanish Americans had nothing like the training in self-government and respect for law and order that our ancestors received both in England and here, for centuries before they won independence. The Spanish Americans have had to work it all out for themselves in the last hundred years or so, and a wonderfully good job they have made of it in that time; particularly in the big, stable republics of the south temperate zone. But in too many of the little countries along the shore of the Caribbean,—the region which a great American statesman has called "the land of the fantastic and the unexpected," men still prefer to vote as their forefathers did, with swords and cannon. Of all these backward countries, the one that has changed least since the days of the conquistadores is Colombia.
Panama was too small a state to stand alone, after it became independent of Spain, and accepted an invitation from Bogotá to put itself under the government there, but quickly found that it had exchanged King Log for King Stork. Almost immediately there were attempted revolts, and twice, in 1830 and again ten years later, the Isthmus won complete independence, and only returned to New Granada on promises of better treatment, solemnly made, but never realized. It was furthermore recognized, and set forth in the Constitution of that country, that Panama was a sovereign state, and that it or any one of the others had as much right to withdraw and set up an independent government as Virginia or New York or Massachusetts had under the old Articles of Confederation.
