These fears of the Court were still farther increased, when a few years before the peace of Versailles, Gabriel Condorcanqui the son of the Cacique of Tongasuca, better known under the name of Tupac-Amaru, stirred up the Indians of Peru, to re-establish at Cuzco the antient empire of the Incas. This civil war during which the Indians committed the most atrocious cruelties, lasted nearly two years; and if the Spaniards had lost the battle in the province of Tinta, the bold undertaking of Tupac-Amaru might have had fatal consequences, not only for the interests of the Mother Country, but perhaps also for the ex istence of all the whites settled on the table lands of the Cordilleras, and the neighbouring vallies. However extraordinary this event may have been, its causes were in no degree connected with the movements which the progress of civilization, and the desire of a free government, gave rise to in the English Colonies. Cut off from the rest of the world, and carrying on no commerce but with the ports of the Mother Country, Peru and Mexico did not then enter into the ideas which agitated the inhabitants of New England.

Within these twenty years, the Spanish and Portuguese settlements of the New Continent, have experienced considerable changes in their moral and political state; and the want of in

struction and information, has begun to be felt with the increasing population and prosperity, The freedom of trade with neutrals, which the Court of Madrid, yielding to imperions circumstances, has from time to time, granted to the Island of Cuba, the coast of Caracas, the ports of Vera Cruz and Monte Video, has brought the colonists into contact with the Anglo-Americans, the French, the English, and the Danes; the colonists have formed the most correct ideas respecting the state of Spain, compared with the other powers of Europe; and the American youth, sacrificing part of their national prejudices, have formed a marked predilection for those nations, whose cultivation is farther advanced than that of the European Spaniards. In these circumstances, we are not to be astonished, that the political movements which have taken place in Europe since 1789, have excited the liveliest interest among a people who have long been aspiring to rights, the privation of which is both an obstacle to the public prosperity, and a motive of resentment against the Mother Country.

This disposition of the minds of men, induced the viceroys and governors in some provinces to have recourse to measures, which far from quieting the agitation of the Colonists, contributed to increase their discontent. The germ of revolt was believed to be discovered

in every association, which had the public illumination for its object. The establishment of presses was prohibited in towns of forty and fifty thousand inhabitants; and peaceful citizens, who in a country retirement read in secret the works of Montesquieu, Robertson, or Rousseau, were considered as possessed of revolutionary ideas. When the war broke out between France and Spain, unfortunate Frenchmen who had been settled in Mexico for twenty and thirty years, were dragged to prison. One of them dreading a renewal of the barbarous spectacle of an auto-da-fe, put an end to his life in the prisons of the Inquisition; and his body was burned on the place of the Quemadero. At the same period, the government imagined they had discovered a conspiracy at Santa Fe, the capital of the kingdom of New Grenada; and individuals who had by the way of trade with Saint Domingo procured French journals, were thrown into chains. Young people of 16 years of age were put to the torture, to extort from them secrets of which they had no knowledge.

In the midst of these agitations, magistrates of respectability, and it is pleasant to dwell on the circumstance, even Europeans raised their voices against these acts of injustice and violence. They represented to the court, that a distrustful policy merely irritated men's minds,

and that it was not by force, and by increasing the number of the troops composed of natives, but by governing with equity, by perfecting the social institutions, by granting the just demands of the Colonists, that they might long hope to draw the ties closer between the Colonies, and the peninsula of Spain. These salutary advices were not followed; the colonial system of government underwent no reform; and in 1796, in a country where the progress of knowledge was favoured by frequent communications, with the United States, and the foreign West India Colonies, a great revolutionary commotion very nearly annihilated at a single blow the Spanish domination. Don Josef España, a rich merchant of Caracas, and Don Manuel Wal, an officer of engineers, residing at Guayra, conceived the bold project of establishing the independence of the province of Venezuela, and uniting to it the provinces of New Andalusia, New Barcelona, Maracaybo, Coro, Varinas, and Guayana, under the name of the United States of South America*. The consequences of this unsuccessful revolution are described by M. Depons, in his travels in Terra Firmat. The confederates were arrested before the general insurrection could take place; España

* Las siete provincias unidas de la America meridional. ↑ T. i. p. 228-233.

brought to the scaffold, saw his end approach with the courage of a man capable of great designs; and Wal died in the Island of Trinidad, where he found an asylum, but no assistance.

Notwithstanding the tranquility of character, and extreme docility of the people in the Spanish Colonies, and notwithstanding the particular situation of the inhabitants who are dispersed over a vast extent of country, and in the enjoyment of that individual liberty which always accompanies a life of solitude, political agitations would have been more frequent since the peace of Versailles, and especially since 1789, if the mutual hatred of the casts, and the dread which the whites and the whole body of freemen entertain of the great number of blacks and Indians, had not arrested the effects of popular discontent. These motives as we have explained in the beginning of this work*, have become still more painful since the events which have taken place in Saint Domingo; and it cannot be doubted that they have contributed more to preserve tranquillity in the Spanish Colonies, than the rigorous measures adopted, and the formation of militias, of which the number amounts in Peru to more than forty thousand men, and in the

* Vol, i. Chap. i.