HUMBOLDT’S HISTORY OF NEW SPAIN.

The “Literary Panorama” contains a very excellent review of Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain.

We shall present our readers with frequent extracts from this valuable track of information.

At present we have only room for the following: [Boston Gazette.

“ The condition of man is the most interesting object in every country; and we confess ourselves gratified by finding that in New Spain the number of slaves [negroes] is comparatively few, and the state of the Indians is less unhappy than we had been accustomed to suppose.

We extract with pleasure a passage from which it appears that the mines, though a considerable source of wealth, are not the only, or even the chief wealth of the province of Mexico.

“The Indian cultivator is poor, but he is free.

His state is even greatly preferable to that of the peasantry in a greater part of the north of Europe.

There are neither corvees nor villanage in New Spain; and the number of slaves is next to nothing.

Sugar is chiefly the produce of free hands.

There the principal objects of agriculture are not the productions to which European luxury has assigned a variable and arbitrary value, but cereal gramina, nutrive roots, and the agave, the vine of the Indians.

The appearance of the country proclaims to the traveller, that the soil nourishes him who cultivates it, and that the true prosperity of the Mexican people neither depends on the accidents of foreign commerce, nor on the unruly politicks of Europe.

“Those who only know the interiour of the Spanish colonies from the vague and uncertain notions hitherto published, will have some difficulty in believing that the principal sources of the Mexican riches are by no means the mines; but an agriculture which has been gradually ameliorating since the end of the last century.

Without reflecting on the immense extent of the country, and especially the great number of provinces which appear totally destitute of precious metals, we generally imagine that all the activity of the Mexican population is directed to the working of the mines.

Because the agriculture has made a very considerable progress in the capitania general of Caraccas, in the kingdom of Guatimala, the island of Cuba, and wherever the mountains are accounted poor in mineral productions, it has been inferred that it is to the working of the mines that we are to attribute the small care bestowed on the cultivation of the soil in other parts of the Spanish colonies.

This reasoning is just when applied to small portions of territory.

No doubt in the provinces of Choco and Antioqua, and the coast of Barbacoas, the inhabitants are fonder of seeking for gold washed down in the brooks and ravines, than of cultivating a virgin and fertile soil; and in the beginning of the conquest, the Spaniards who abandoned the peninsula or Canary islands, to settle in Peru and Mexico, had no other view but the discovery of the precious metals.

Auri rabida sitis a cultura.

Hispanos divertit, says a writer of those times, Pedro Martyr, in his work on the discovery of Yutacan and the colonization of the Antilles.

“In Mexico, the best cultivated fields, those which recall to the mind of the traveller the beautiful plains of France, are those which extend from Salamanca towards Siloe, Guanaxuato, and the Villa de Leon, and which surround the richest mines of the known world.

Wherever metallick seams have been discovered in the most uncultivated parts of the Cordilleras, on the insulated and desert table lands, the working of mines, far from impeding the cultivation of the soil, has been singularly favourable to it.

Travelling along the ridge of the Andees, or the mountainous part of Mexico, we every where see the most striking examples of the beneficial influence of the mines on agriculture.

Were it not for the establishments formed for the working of the mines, how many places would have remained desert?

How many districts uncultivated in the four intendancies of Guanaxuato, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi, and Durango, between the parallels of 21 and 25 where the most considerable metallick wealth of New Spain is to be found?

If the town is placed on the arid side, or the crest of the Cordilleras, the new colonists can only draw from a distance the means of their subsistence, and the maintenance of the great number of cattle employed in drawing off the water, and raising and amalgamating the mineral produce.

Want soon awakens industry.—The soil begins to be cultivated in the ravines and declivities of the neighbouring mountains, wherever the rock is covered with earth.

Farms are established in the neighbourhood of the mine.

The high price of provision, from the competition of the purchasers indemnifies the cultivator for the privations to which he is exposed, from the hard life of the mountains.

Thus, from the hope of gain alone, and the motives of mutual interest, which are the most powerful bonds of society, and without any interference on the part of the government in colonization, a mine which, at first appeared insulated in the midst of wild and desert mountains, becomes, in a short time, connected with the lands which have long been under cultivation.”