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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There Only, At Mexico,
Cundinamarca, Quito And Peru, They Found Traces Of Ancient
Civilization, Agricultural Nations And Flourishing Empires.
This
circumstance, together with the increase of the native mountain
population, the almost exclusive possession of great metallic wealth,
and the commercial relations established from the beginning of the
sixteenth century with the Indian archipelago, have given a peculiar
character to the Spanish possessions in equinoctial America.
In the
East Indies, the people who fell into the hands of the English and
Portuguese settlers were wandering tribes or hunters. Far from forming
a portion of the agricultural and laborious population, as on the
tableland of Anahuac, at Guatimala and in Upper Peru, they generally
withdrew at the approach of the whites. The necessity of labour, the
preference given to the cultivation of the sugar-cane, indigo, and
cotton, the cupidity which often accompanies and degrades industry,
gave birth to that infamous slave-trade, the consequences of which
have been alike fatal to the old and the new world. 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. Doubtless, in consequence of the great
revolutions which human society undergoes, the public fortune, the
common patrimony of civilization, is found differently divided among
the nations of the old and the new world: but by degrees the
equilibrium is restored; and it is a fatal, I had almost said an
impious prejudice, to consider the growing prosperity of any other
part of our planet as a calamity to Europe. The independence of the
colonies will not contribute to isolate them from the old civilized
nations, but will rather bring all more closely together. Commerce
tends to unite countries which a jealous policy has long separated. It
is the nature of civilization to go forward without any tendency to
decline in the spot that gave it birth. Its progress from east to
west, from Asia to Europe, proves nothing against this axiom. A clear
light loses none of its brilliancy by being diffused over a wider
space. Intellectual cultivation, that fertile source of national
wealth, advances by degrees and extends without being displaced. Its
movement is not a migration: and though it may seem to be such in the
east, it is because barbarous hordes possessed themselves of Egypt,
Asia Minor, and of once free Greece, the forsaken cradle of the
civilization of our ancestors.
The barbarism of nations is the consequence of oppression exercised by
internal despotism or foreign conquest; and it is always accompanied
by progressive impoverishment, by a diminution of the public fortune.
Free and powerful institutions, adapted to the interests of all,
remove these dangers; and the growing civilization of the world, the
competition of labour and of trade, are not the ruin of states whose
welfare flows from a natural source. Productive and commercial Europe
will profit by the new order of things in Spanish America, as it would
profit from events that might put an end to barbarism in Greece, on
the northern coast of Africa and in other countries subject to Ottoman
tyranny. What most menaces the prosperity of the ancient continent is
the prolongation of those intestine struggles which check production
and diminish at the same time the number and wants of consumers. This
struggle, begun in Spanish America six years after my departure, is
drawing gradually to an end. We shall soon see both shores of the
Atlantic peopled by independent nations, ruled by different forms of
Government, but united by the remembrance of a common origin,
uniformity of language, and the wants which civilization creates. It
may be said that the immense progress of the art of navigation has
contracted the boundaries of the seas. The Atlantic already assumes
the form of a narrow channel which no more removes the New World from
the commercial states of Europe, than the Mediterranean, in the
infancy of navigation, removed the Greeks of Peloponnesus from those
of Ionia, Sicily, and the Cyrenaic region.
I have thought it right to enter into these general considerations on
the future connection of the two continents, before tracing the
political sketch of the provinces of Venezuela. These provinces,
governed till 1810 by a captain-general residing at Caracas, are now
united to the old viceroyalty of New Grenada, or Santa Fe, under the
name of the Republic of Columbia. I will not anticipate the
description which I shall have hereafter to give of New Grenada; but,
in order to render my observations on the statistics of Venezuela more
useful to those who would judge of the political importance of the
country and the advantages it may offer to the trade of Europe, even
in its present unadvanced state of cultivation, I will describe the
United Provinces of Venezuela in their relations with Cundinamarca, or
New Grenada, and as forming part of the new state of Columbia.
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