Secondly, America is itself a new market for the produce of its own silver mines; and as its advances in agriculture, industry, and population are much more rapid than those of the most thriving countries in Europe, its demand must increase much more rapidly.The English colonies are altogether a new market, which, partly for coin and partly for plate, requires a continually augmenting supply of silver through a great continent where there never was any demand before.The greater part, too, of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies are altogether new markets.New Granada, the Yucatan, Paraguay, and the Brazils were, before discovered by the Europeans, inhabited by savage nations who had neither arts nor agriculture.A considerable degree of both has now been introduced into all of them.Even Mexico and Peru, though they cannot be considered as altogether new markets, are certainly much more extensive ones than they ever were before.After all the wonderful tales which have been published concerning the splendid state of those countries in ancient times, whoever reads, with any degree of sober judgment, the history of their first discovery and conquest, will evidently discern that, in arts, agriculture, and commerce, their inhabitants were much more ignorant than the Tartars of the Ukraine are at present.Even the Peruvians, the more civilised nation of the two, though they made use of gold and silver as ornaments, had no coined money of any kind.Their whole commerce was carried on by barter, and there was accordingly scarce any division of labour among them.Those who cultivated the ground were obliged to build their own houses, to make their own household furniture, their own clothes, shoes, and instruments of agriculture.The few artificers among them are said to have been all maintained 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 these 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 1740and 1746, represents it as containing more than fifty thousand.
The difference in their accounts of the populousness of several other principal towns in 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 begun 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 overland 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, had been almost continually augmenting.The increasing consumption 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.
