Page:Mexico (1829) Volumes 1 and 2.djvu/530

490 APPENDIX. Never, certainly, has America known a more critical state of affairs, and never was any European governor so well entitled as your Excellency to dispense at once with the maxims of past ages ; for if, in less danger- ous times, the laws have often been allowed to sleep, when their obser- vance might have checked the free action of the Government, surely your Excellency cannot now be condemned for the adoption of a measure, by which alone the preservation of this part of the monarchy can be effected. Those should be doomed to eternal infamy, who maintain that, under present circumstances, it would be injurious either to Spain, or to this country, to open a free intercourse with Great Britain. But even sup- posing the measure to be injurious, still it is a necessary evil, and one which, since it cannot be avoided, ought at least to be made use of for the general good, by endeavouring to derive every possible advantage from it, and thus to convert it into a means of ensuring the safety of the state. Since the English first appeared on our coasts, in 1 806, the merchants of that nation have not lost sight of the Rio de la Plata in their specula- tions. A series of commercial adventures has followed, which has pro- vided almost entirely for the consumption of the country ; and this great importation, carried on in defiance of laws and reiterated prohibitions, has met with no other obstacles than those necessary to deprive the Cus- tom-house of its dues, and the country of the advantages which it might have derived from a free exportation of its own produce in return. The result of this system has been to put the English in the exclusive possession of the right of providing the country with all the foreign mer- chandize that it requires ; while the Government has lest the immense revenues which the introduction of so large a proportion of foreign ma- nufactures ought to have produced, from too scrupulous an observance of laws, which have never been more scandalously violated than at the mo- ment when their observance was insisted upon by the merchants of the capital. For what. Sir, can be more glaringly absurd than to hear a merchant clamouring for the enforcement of the prohibitive laws, and the exclusion of foreign tr.ide, at the very door of a shop filled with English goods, clandestinely imported To the advantages which the Government will derive from the open introduction of foreign goods, may be added those which must acrue to the country from the free exportation of its own produce. Our vast plains produce annually a million of hides, without reckoning other skins, corn, or tallow, all of which are valuable, as articles of fo- reign trade. But the magazines of our resident merchants are full; there is no exportation ; the capital usually invested in these speculations is already employed, and the immense residue of the produce, thrown back upon the hands of the landed-proprietors, or purchased at a price infinitely below its real value, has reduced them to the most deplorable