As yet action has been confined to the seizure of
four small armed vessels, which submitted without a struggle in the harbour of La Guayra, three of which are said to have been subsequently sunk. This report, at the moment of our writing, has not been officially confirmed. But if it should prove correct, we wonder whether Great Britain would, if single-handed, have resorted to such a step. President Castro, who seems to be afraid of his own fierce people, at first arrested all Englishmen and Germans, but on a stern remonstrance from the United States Minister, who on the retreat of the British and German representatives accepted the guardianship of their interests, he released the majority. The President, it is believed, seized them as hostages, a purely barbaric conception, hostages being worthless unless you are prepared to kill them ; but their subsequent release proves that he has not entirely lost his head. We can hardly believe, in spite of his thrasonic manifesto, that he will lose it, for if he does he stakes his life on an enterprise in which even he can scarcely expect success. It is, however, possible, if he can work his people up to the necessary degree of fury, that be will abandon the ports, abolish duties, retire to the interior, and bid defiance alike to Europe and America. Both would then be in something of a quandary, for neither Germany nor Britain will land armies ; at most they will occupy Caracas ; and though America might; the statesmen of Washington have no desire for another vast Spanish-American possession. That is the weak point of fleets. They are all powerful within the range of their guns, and quite powerless beyond them. We see rumours of gunboats to ascend the Orinoco, but nothing binds the Venezuelans to the banks of their great river.
