Some, indeed, remained, and retained a sufficient portion of their funds to give a certain activity to Trade, and to promote particular branches of industry; but even the most hardy withdrew as soon as the separation from the Mother-country became inevitable, and, in the years 1821 and 1822, the whole remaining surplus capital of Mexico, was, if I may use the expression, abstracted from the circulation.
Of the amount of this capital no exact estimate can be obtained, a great part of it having been conveyed out of the country by secret channels.[1] The Mexicans affirm that it exceeded one hundred millions of dollars; (the calculations of the best informed of those whom I have consulted upon the subject, varying from eighty, to one hundred and forty millions,) a very large proportion of which was actually exported in gold or silver.
This sudden diminution of the circulating medium could only have occurred in a Colony, compelled, like Mexico, by peculiar circumstances, to depend, in a great measure, upon a capital not strictly its own. In the best regulated community it must have occasioned great embarrassment and distress, but in a country of lavish expenditure and improvident habits, it almost destroyed, for the time, the possibility of improvement.
All the sources of National wealth were dried up;
- ↑ I shall have occasion to investigate this subject more accurately in Book IV.
