Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Happily, In The
Continental Part Of Spanish America, The Number Of African Slaves Is
So Inconsiderable That, Compared With The Slave Population Of Brazil,
Or With That Of The Southern Part Of The United States, It Is Found To
Be In The Proportion Of One To Fourteen.
The whole of the Spanish
colonies, without excluding the islands of Cuba and Porto Rico, have
not, over a surface which exceeds at least by one-fifth that of
Europe, as many negroes as the single state of Virginia.
The Spanish
Americans, in the union of New Spain and Guatimala, present an
example, unique in the torrid zone, namely, a nation of eight millions
of inhabitants governed conformably with European institutions and
laws, cultivating sugar, cacao, wheat and grapes, and having scarcely
a slave brought from Africa.
The population of the New Continent as yet surpasses but little that
of France or Germany. It doubles in the United States in twenty-three
or twenty-five years; and at Mexico, even under the government of the
mother country, it doubles in forty or forty-five years. Without
indulging too flattering hopes of the future, it may be admitted that
in less than a century and a half the population of America will equal
that of Europe. This noble rivalry in civilization and the arts of
industry and commerce, far from impoverishing the old continent, as
has often been supposed it might at the expense of the new one, will
augment the wants of the consumer, the mass of productive labour, and
the activity of exchange.
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