cies of cultivation to which he is most attached. We will not retrace the view of those delicious countries, situated half way up the ascent, in the region of oaks and pincs, between 1,000 and 1,400 metres *, where a perpetual spring reigns, where the most delicious fruits of the Indies are cultivated beside those of Europe, and where these enjoyments are troubled neither by the multitude of insects, nor the fear of the yellow fever (vomito), nor the frequency of earthquakes. We will not discuss in this place if, without the tropics, there exists a region in which man, with less labour, can supply more abundantly the wants of a numerous family. The physical prosperity of the colonist does not alone modify his intellectual and moral existence.

When a European, who has enjoyed all that is most attractive in the social life of countries the farthest advanced in civilization, transports himself into these distant regions of the new continent, he feels oppressed at every step with the influence which the colonial government has for centuries exercised over the minds of the inhabitants. A well informed man, who merely interests himself in the intellectual developement of the species, suffers less perhaps than the man who is endowed with great sensibility. The former institutes a comparison with the mother country; from mari

* 3,280 and 4,592 feet. Trans.

time communication he procures books and instruments; he sees with he sees with ecstacy the progress progress which the exact sciences have made in the great cities of Spanish America; and the contempla ion of nature in all her grandeur, and the astonishing variety of her productions, indemnifies his mind for the privations to which his position condemns him. But the man of sensibility must seek in the Spanish colonies for every thing agreeable in life within himself alone. It is in this way that insolation and solitude have their attractions for him if he wishes to enjoy peaceably the advantages afforded by the excellence of the climate, the aspect of a never-fading verdure, and the political calm of the new world. While I freely give these ideas to the world, I am not censuring the moral character of the inhabitants of Mexico or Peru; nor do I say that the people of Lima are worse than those of Cadiz. I am rather inclined to believe, what many other travellers have observed before me, that the Americans are endowed by nature with a gentleness of manners rather approaching to effeminacy, as the energy of several European nations easily degenerates into harshness. The want of sociability so universal in the Spanish colonies, and the hatreds which divide the casts of greatest affinity, the effects of which shed a bitterness over the life of the colonists, are solely due to the political principles by which these regions have been governed since the sixteenth century.

A government, aware of the true interests of humanity, will be able to diffuse information and instruction, and by extinguishing gradually the monstrous inequality of rights and fortunes, will succeed in augmenting the physical prosperity of the colonists; but it will find immense difficulties to overcome before rendering the inhabitants sociable, and teaching them to consider themselves mutually in the light of fellow citizens.

Let us not forget that in the United States society is formed in a very different manner from what it is in Mexico and the other continental regions of the Spanish colonies. Penetrating into the Alleghany mountains, the Europeans found immense forests, in which a few tribes of hunters wandered up and down, attached by no tie to an uncultivated soil. At the approach of the new colonists, the natives gradually retired towards the western savannas in the neighbourhood of the Mississipi and the Missoury. In this manner free men of the same race and the same origin became the first elements of a new people." In North America," says a celebrated statesman, co a traveller who sets out from a great town where the social state has attained to perfection, traverses successively all degrees of civilization and industry, which keep diminishing till he arrives in a few days at the rude and unseemly hut formed of the trunks of trees newly cut down. Such a journey is a sort of practical analysis of the origin of na

tions and states.

We set out from the most com

plicated union to arrive at the most simple elements; we travel in retrogression the history of the progress of the human mind; and we find in space what is due only to the succession of time*"

1

In New Spain and Peru, if we except the missions, the colonists nowhere returned to the state of nature. Fixing themselves in the midst of agricultural nations, who themselves lived under governments equally complicated and despotic, the Europeans took advantage of the preponderancy of their civilization, their cunning, and the authority they derived from the conquest. This particular situation, and the mixture of races of which the interests are diametrically opposite, became an inexhaustible source of hatred and disunion. In proportion as the descendants of the Europeans became more numerous than those sent over directly by the mother country, the white race divided into two parties, of which the ties of blood cannot heal the resentments. The colonial government from a mistaken policy wished to take advantage of these dissensions. The greater the colony, the greater the suspicion of the administration. According to the ideas which unfortunately have been adopted for ages, these distant regions are considered as tributary to Europe. Authority

* M. de Talleyrand in his Essay on Colonization.

is there distributed not in the manner which the public interest requires, but according as the dread of seeing a too rapid increase in the prosperity of the inhabitants seems to dictate. Seeking security in civil dissensions, in the balance of power, and in a complication of all the springs of the great political machine, the mother country foments incessantly the spirit of party and hatred among the casts and constituted authorities. From this state of things arises a rancour which disturbs the enjoyments of social life.