The result of this system has been to put the English in the exclusive possession of the right of providing the country with all the foreign merchandize that it requires; while the Government has lost the immense revenues which the introduction of so large a proportion of foreign manufactures ought to have produced, from too scrupulous an observance of laws, which have never been more scandalously violated than at the moment when their observance was insisted upon by the merchants of the capital. For what, Sir, can be more glaringly absurd than to hear a merchant clamouring for the enforcement of the prohibitive laws, and the exclusion of foreign trade, at the very door of a shop filled with English goods, clandestinely imported?
To the advantages which the Government will derive from the open introduction of foreign goods, may be added those which must accrue to the country from the free exportation of its own produce.
Our vast plains produce annually a million of hides, without reckoning other skins, corn, or tallow, all of which are valuable, as articles of foreign trade. But the magazines of our resident merchants are full; there is no exportation; the capital usually invested in these speculations is already employed, and the immense residue of the produce, thrown back upon the hands of the landed-proprietors, or purchased at a price infinitely below its real value, has reduced them to the most deplorable state of wretchedness, and compelled them to abandon a labour which no longer repays them for the toil and expence with which it is attended.
The freedom of trade in America was not proscribed as a real evil, but because it was a sacrifice required of the colonies by the Mother-country. The events which led to the gradual increase of this exclusive commerce, till it became a monopoly of the Cadiz merchants, are well known.
Well informed men exclaimed in vain against a system so weak, so ruinous, and so ill judged; but inveterate evils are not to be cured at once. Minor reforms had paved the way for a system founded upon sounder principles, when the late extraordinary events, changing entirely the political state of Spain, destroyed by one unforeseen blow all the pretexts
