Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 97 of 332 - First - Home
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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 97 of 332
Words from 50426 to 50937
of 174507