Those 1800 Square Leagues, The Centre Of Agriculture, Are Twice As Numerously Peopled As Finland, But Still A Third Less Than The Province Of Cuenca, Which Is The Least Populous Of All Spain. We Cannot Dwell On This Result Without A Painful Feeling.

Such is the state to which colonial politics and maladministration have, during three centuries, reduced a country which, for natural wealth, may vie with all that is most wonderful on earth.

For a region equally desert, we must look either to the frozen regions of the north, or westward of the Allegheny mountains towards the forests of Tennessee, where the first clearings have only begun within the last eighty years!

The most cultivated part of the province of Caracas, the basin of the lake of Valencia, commonly called Los Valles de Aragua, contained in 1810 nearly 2000 inhabitants to the square league. Supposing a relative population three times less, and taking off from the whole surface of the Capitania-General nearly 24,000 square leagues as being occupied by the Llanos and the forests of Guiana, and, therefore, presenting great obstacles to agricultural labourers, we should still obtain a population of six millions for the remaining 9700 square leagues. Those who, like myself, have lived long within the tropics, will find no exaggeration in these calculations; for I suppose for the portion the most easily cultivated a relative population equal to that in the intendencias of Puebla and Mexico,* full of barren mountains, and extending towards the coast of the Pacific over regions almost desert.

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