EMANCIPATION OF SPANISH AMERICA.

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Miranda, for the purpose of being distributed among his countrymen, previous to his unsuccessful expedition

in 1806.

Perhaps the greatest commercial benefit, resulting from the emancipation of Spanish America, would be the formation of a navigable passage across the isthmus of Panama, the junction of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The expense of such an undertaking would not exceed three or four millions sterling; and Britain could not more profitably employ twenty or thirty thousand of her distressed labourers than in executing such a task, under the superintendence of competent engineers. The completion of this navigation would give England the command of the commerce of the whole world, and soon compensate her for all the toil, and wealth, and blood, which she has expended during twenty-five years of unexampled warfare, waged for the redemption of Europe from revolutionary bondage.

In the year 1790, the scheme of Spanish American emancipation was first proposed to Mr. Pitt by General Miranda, and met with a cordial reception; but was soon afterward laid aside, on account of Britain and Spain resuming their pacific relations with each other. In the year 1797, Miranda was met at Paris by deputies and commissioners from Mexico and the other principal provinces of Spanish America, for the purpose of concerting with him the means of emancipating their country. It was decided that Miranda should, in their name, repair to England, and communicate their propositions to the British government; one of which was to join the Atlantic and Pacific at the expense of the colonies, and another to cede the Floridas to the United States, the Mississippi being proposed as the boundary between the two nations; and the stipulation of a small military force, from the Anglo-Americans, to aid the establishment of the proposed independence. It was also proposed to resign all the islands which belong to the Spaniards, excepting Cuba, the possession of which is rendered necessary by the situation of the Havanna, commanding the passage from the Gulf of Mexico. This

E

document is dated at Paris, 22d of December, 1797. The proposal for the return of Miranda to England was acceded to by Mr. Pitt, with whom a conference was held in January following. It was proposed that the United States should furnish ten thousand troops; and the British government agreed to find money and ships. But Mr. Adams, then the American President, declined to transmit an immediate answer; and the measure was, in consequence, postponed. In the year 1806, Mr. Jefferson, at that time President of the United States, disavowed the expedition of Miranda to emancipate Spanish America, and actually caused Messrs. Smith and Ogden, two merchants of the city of NewYork, to be indicted in the Circuit Court for this District for aiding and abetting Miranda's enterprise; but the jury found a verdict of acquittal. For a most ample and splendid account of the practicability and effects of liberating Spanish America, and joining the two oceans, see the thirteenth volume of the Edinburgh Review, pp. 277-311, both inclusive.

It appears necessary for England, now, to make some extraordinary effort to recruit her exhausted strength, and to relieve her present pressure. She has, indeed, during the lapse of five and twenty years, directed, with a daring and a steady hand, the vast resources of her mighty empire, against the common enemy of the human race: with the guardianship of presiding genius, she has aided the weak and restrained the encroachments of the strong: she has assisted the people of continental Europe in their patriotic efforts to trample beneath their feet the foreign domination of an invading foe; she has caused the star of Napoleon to fade into a dim tinct; she has put together the glittering fragments of disjointed Europe, and given again to that fair portion of the world the beamings of religion, the light of morals, and the beauty of social order. But her recent glories have led her to a painful pre-eminence; henceforth she is doomed to the proud but melancholy necessity of being first or nothing. The moment she recedes, the moment she bows her lofty head

beneath the ascendency of any other nation, that moment she is dashed from off her wide ambitious base, and falls, like Lucifer, never to rise again. In her late protracted conflict, her frame has been shattered; her finances are dilapidated; her agriculture languishes; her manufactures droop; her commerce is diminished; her population is impoverished; and, if she hopes to sustain that high eminence which her achievements have reached, in the times of Elizabeth, of William, and of her present sovereign; achievements which have rendered her the arbitress of Europe, the bulwark of civil and religious liberty, and the tutelary angel of man; she must hasten to emancipate the Spanish American colonists, and unite the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Unless some measures be adopted by Britain to employ and relieve her superabundant and indigent population, a much greater proportion than has ever yet left her native isles will find their way hither, to augment the number of our American citizens.

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CHAPTER. III.

On the Manufactures of the United States.

THERE can be no doubt that agriculture has a tendency to produce a more abundant and more healthy population than that which springs from manufactures; but agriculture and manufactures act and re-act upon each other for their mutual benefit; for the greatest and most important branch of the commerce of every nation is that which is carried on by the inhabitants of the towns and cities with those of the country. The townsmen draw from the people of the country the rude produce, the fruits of the soil, for which they pay by sending back into the country a part of this rude produce manufactured and prepared for immediate use; or, in other words, this trade between town and country consists in a given quantity of rude produce being exchanged for a given quantity of manufactured produce. Whatever, therefore, has a tendency, in any country, to diminish the progress of manufactures, has also a tendency to diminish the home market, (the most important of all markets for the rude produce of land) and consequently to cripple the efforts of agriculture.

In young and lately established countries, however, where the population is not, as yet, sufficiently numerous to answer fully the demand for labour; it is perhaps more adviseable to confine their attention chiefly to the raising of rude produce, to the clearing new lands, and cultivating those already reclaimed; because they can import manufactured goods from an old and thickly peopled country, at a cheaper rate than they can fabrisate them in their own; and they will more rapidly in

AGRICULTURE AND MANUFACTURES.

53

crease the number, strength, and wealth of their people by so doing, than by consuming a larger quantity of capital in forming manufactured goods of a worse quality, and at a higher price than that for which they can bring them from abroad. Besides, as the wages of labour are so high, and land so cheap, in the United States (and in all new countries), there is a continual bounty offered to labourers to leave their manufacturing masters, and go and buy land, and till it for themselves; since every man, who has any proper feeling of independence beating at his heart, would rather toil for himself and his family, as an uncontrolled yeoman, than labour as a confined servant to a stranger. Whence the manufacturers would be (as indeed they are daily and hourly in the United States,) liable to frequent interruptions in their proceedings, and suffer much prejudice in their trade, enhancing the price and deteriorating the quality of their wares; all which evil must ultimately fall upon the consumers, and necessarily entail a burdensome impediment upon the productive exertions of the community.

The United States, therefore, it should seem, would do well not anxiously to endeavour to force the production of manufactures by government bounties, by protecting or prohibitory duties, by monopoly prices, before an effectual demand shall be made for them by an increased density of population along the seaboard, and in the interior; by the more minute division of labour, and by the more complete filling up of the other channels of trade and agriculture. Nay, perhaps it would be wiser, for some years yet to come (until the wilderness be reclaimed, and the population be more compact), for the Americans to confine themselves chiefly to the raising of raw materials, and let Europe continue to be the workshop where those raw materials might be manufactured; because experience has uniformly shown that no nation has ever yet pushed its manufactures to any great extent, without introducing and continuing a very alarming quantity of misery and disease, decrepitude, vice, and profligacy, among the lower orders of the peo