by the sovereign, the nobles, and the
priests, and were probably their servants or
slaves. All the ancient arts of Mexico and
Peru have never furnished one single manufacture
to Europe. The Spanish armies,
though they scarce ever exceeded five hundred
men, and frequently did not amount to half
that number, found almost everywhere great
difficulty in procuring subsistence. The famines
which they are said to have occasioned
almost wherever they went, in countries, too,
which at the same time are represented as
very populous and well cultivated, sufficiently
demonstrate that the story of this populousness
and high cultivation is in a great measure
fabulous. The Spanish colonies are under
a government in many respects less favourable
to agriculture, improvement, and population,
than that of the English colonies.
They seem, however, to be advancing in all
those much more rapidly than any country in
Europe. In a fertile soil and happy climate,
the great abundance and cheapness of land, a
circumstance common to all new colonies, is,
it seems, so great an advantage, as to compensate
many defects in civil government. Frezier,
who visited Peru in 1713, represents
Lima as containing between twenty-five and
twenty-eight thousand inhabitants. Ulloa,
who resided in the same country between
1740 and 1746, represents it as containing
more than fifty thousand. The difference in
their accounts of the populousness of several
other principal towns of Chili and Peru is
nearly the same; and as there seems to be no
reason to doubt of the good information of
either, it marks an increase which is scarce inferior
to that of the English colonies. America,
therefore, is a new market for the produce
of its own silver mines, of which the demand
must increase much more rapidly than
that of the most thriving country in Europe.
Thirdly, the East Indies is another market
for the produce of the silver mines of America,
and a market which, from the time of
the first discovery of those mines, has been
continually taking off a greater and a greater
quantity of silver. Since that time, the direct
trade between America and the East Indies,
which is carried on by means of the Acapulco
ships, has been continually augmenting,
and the indirect intercourse by the way of Europe
has been augmenting in a still greater
proportion. During the sixteenth century,
the Portuguese were the only European nation
who carried on any regular trade to the
East Indies. In the last years of that century,
the Dutch began to encroach upon this
monopoly, and in a few years expelled them
from their principal settlements in India.
During the greater part of the last century,
those two nations divided the most considerable
part of the East India trade between
them; the trade of the Dutch continually
augmenting in a still greater proportion than
that of the Portuguese declined. The English
and French carried on some trade with
India in the last century, but it has been
greatly augmented in the course of the present.
The East India trade of the Swedes
and Danes began in the course of the present
century. Even the Muscovites now trade regularly
with China, by a sort of caravans
which go over land through Siberia and Tartary
to Pekin. The East India trade of all
these nations, if we except that of the French,
which the last war had well nigh annihilated,
has been almost continually augmenting. The
increasing consumptions of East India goods
in Europe is, it seems, so great, as to afford a
gradual increase of employment to them all.
Tea, for example, was a drug very little used
in Europe, before the middle of the last century.
At present, the value of the tea annually
imported by the English East India company,
for the use of their own countrymen,
amounts to more than a million and a half
a year; and even this is not enough; a great
deal more being constantly smuggled into the
country from the ports of Holland, from Gottenburgh
in Sweden, and from the coast of
France, too, as long as the French East India
company was in prosperity. The consumption
of the porcelain of China, of the
spiceries of the Moluccas, of the piece goods
of Bengal, and of innumerable other articles,
has increased very nearly in a like proportion.
The tonnage, accordingly, of all the
European shipping employed in the East India
trade, at any one time during the last century,
was not, perhaps, much greater than
that of the English East India company before
the late reduction of their shipping.
But in the East Indies, particularly in
China and Indostan, the value of the precious
metals, when the Europeans first began to
trade to those countries, was much higher than
in Europe; and it still continues to be so.
In rice countries, which generally yield two,
sometimes three crops in the year, each of
them more plentiful than any common crop
of corn, the abundance of food must be much
greater than in any corn country of equal extent.
Such countries are accordingly much
more populous. In them, too, the rich, having
a greater superabundance of food to dispose
of beyond what they themselves can consume,
have the means of purchasing a much
greater quantity of the labour of other people.
The retinue of a grandee in China or Indostan
accordingly is, by all accounts, much more
numerous and splendid than that of the richest
subjects in Europe. The same superabundance
of food, of which they have the disposal,
enables them to give a greater quantity
of it for all those singular and rare productions
which nature furnishes but in very small
quantities; such as the precious metals and
the precious stones, the great objects of the
competition of the rich. Though the mines,