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Hegel and His Contemporaries I. THE AMERICAS POLITICALLY DISMISSED AND THEIR ZOOLOGICAL PROBLEMS DISSOLVED AFTER Herder the dispute seems to lose emphasis and dramatic interest . The American revolution recedes into the past, the French revolution commands the attention and emotions of all Europe, the Latin American revolutions are still to come, and when they do in fact come they arouse neither the passionate hopes nor the violent reactions of the first two. America retreats to the very edge of Europe's visible horizon. Interest in the overseas dominions fades almost to the point of extinction. "Perish the colonies rather than a principle!" the reiterated cry of Dupont de Nemours and Robespierre (1791), means this too: that the economic interests of the slave owners and the very existence of the West Indian plantations did not and could not count for anything compared with the revolution's maxims as ordained in Paris. A few years later (1803), in an almost symbolic act, the first consul Napoleon sold the Louisiana territory to the United States for some fifteen million dollars, a stretch of land four or five times bigger than France, and large enough to provide the North American union with a dozen new states. And even his implacable adversaries, the Ideologues, were unanimous in their approval of this peaceful alienation.' A few years more, and Spain saw almost all her American empire crumble, and Portugal lost Brazil. One after another the European powers were expelled from the continent and reduced to lurking on the islands near the coast, or in semiinsular areas like Guiana or Canada, where the climate was extreme and the resources, at the time, practically nonexistent. Monroe's threat of 1823 gave final sanction to a state of affairs that was by then irreversible. The United States, in the person of its first president, George Washington, had already declared that it had no desire to meddle in the affairs of Europe; now it drew the first corollary from that maxim, and in the person of the fifth president warned Europe I. Cf. Echeverria, Mirage. p. 276. 325 326 THE DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD not to meddle in America's affairs. The two hemispheres were to ignore each other, to tum their backs on each other. England, mistress of the seas between the two continents, immediately indicated its willingness to adhere to Monroe's isolationist and tutelary "doctrine." And the Americans were left to seek their destiny alone. Europe, almost relieved of political responsibility, no longer felt America's problems so acutely, or dissolved them in those of a more general nature, the problems of primitive peoples, colonization, and civil progress.2 Talleyrand's case is typical, if somewhat complicated by personal resentments . He comes to the United States not as a pilgrim, but as a fugitive in search of temporary asylum, and disembarks unwillingly, already out of sorts. And in the course of his two years' sojourn (1794-96) he grows ever more vexed at Washington's failure to receive him, more disappointed at his failure to make a lot of money quickly, and more irritated at the distance placed between himself and the courts and drawing rooms which constituted the natural arena for his talents. His inborn liveliness and intelligence, sharpened by necessity, are all for nothing. True, his English is not good. In conversation, writes one of his friends and admirers, he "makes little parsonish witticisms, that are quite lost on everybody," and which in fact would be hardly more appreciated in Paris.3 As for business, at first he criticizes and almost ridicules the currently fashionable speculations on virgin territory, and instead enthuses about the great possibilities of rapid arbitrage in stocks, and forwarddealing operations on merchandise and commodities; later, however, he turns all his dialectical and rhetorical skill to recommending speculation on the land still to be colonized, as the best way of getting rich in the United States, and finally suggests short-term credit-financing of the lucrative export trade in English manufactures to the ex-colonies; all of which would seem to be an indication not so much of any particular ability as salesman, as someone put it, but rather of real and repeated disappointments, and the restless activity they resulted in.4 2. On the decadence of the Amerikakunde in Gennany (but not in the English-oriented Gottingen) toward the end of the century, and its resurgence after 1830, cf., with caution, Doll, op. cit., pp. 436, 454,464,470,507...

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