The Utility Of The Project Is Incontestable If In Times Of Great Drought A Sufficient Quantity Of Water Can Be Brought To The Point Of Partition.

At the Havannah, as in every place where commerce and the wealth it produces increase rapidly, complaints are heard of the prejudicial influence exercised by them on ancient manners.

We cannot here stop to compare the first state of the island of Cuba, when covered with pasturage, before the taking of the capital by the English, and its present condition, since it has become the metropolis of the West Indies; nor to throw into the balance the candour and simplicity of manners of an infant society, against the manners that belong to the development of an advanced civilization. The spirit of commerce, leading to the love of wealth, no doubt brings nations to depreciate what money cannot obtain. But the state of human things is happily such that what is most desirable, most noble, most free in man, is owing only to the inspirations of the soul, to the extent and amelioration of its intellectual faculties. Were the thirst of riches to take absolute possession of every class of society, it would infallibly produce the evil complained of by those who see with regret what they call the preponderance of the industrious system; but the increase of commerce, by multiplying the connections between nations, by opening an immense sphere to the activity of the mind, by pouring capital into agriculture, and creating new wants by the refinement of luxury, furnishes a remedy against the supposed dangers.

FINANCE.

The increase of the agricultural prosperity of the island of Cuba and the influence of the accumulation of wealth on the value of importations, have raised the public revenue in these latter years to four millions and a half, perhaps five millions of piastres. The custom-house of the Havannah, which before 1794 yielded less than 600,000 piastres, and from 1797 to 1800, 1,900,000 piastres, pours into the treasury, since the declaration of free trade, a revenue (importe liquido) of more than 3,100,000 piastres.* (* The custom-house of Port-au-Prince, at Hayti, produced in 1825, the sum of 1,655,764 piastres; that of Buenos Ayres, from 1819 to 1821, average year, 1,655,000 piastres. See Centinela de La Plata, September 1822 Number 8; Argos de Buenos Ayres Number 85.)

The island of Cuba as yet contains only one forty-second part of the population of France; and one half of its inhabitants, being in the most abject indigence, consume but little. Its revenue is nearly equal to that of the Republic of Columbia, and it exceeds the revenue of all the custom-houses of the United States* before the year 1795, when that confederation had 4,500,000 inhabitants, while the island of Cuba contained only 715,000. (* The custom-houses of the United States, which yielded in 1801 to 1808 sixteen millions of dollars, produced in 1815 but 7,282,000.) The principal source of the public revenue of this fine colony is the custom-house, which alone produces above three-fifths, and amply suffices for all the wants of the internal administration and military defence.

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