easy to found on the remittances and orders from America, with a view to avoid the losses resulting from the market being imprudently overstocked, cannot be formed at the very considerable distance of some of the ports from the others. And, lastly, the moderate prices at which foreign commodities were to be procured, in consequence of their being colle6ted in a single place, will be greatly enhanced by the new system: by dispersing them in various directions, it will not allow them to maintain the just value to which a competition had reduced them.
If it were the object of this dissertation to justify the above system, it would not be difficult to dissipate these vain terrors, the offspring of a blind regard to private profit, by establishing the advantages the nation derives from the unlimited freedom of commerce. But as the reflections which arise out of this subject, are necessarily confined to the effects produced on the viceroyalty of Lima, it may be asserted without hesitation, on the testimony of the most exact comparative calculations, between the present condition and that of former times that the mischiefs which have been so much lamented, and so often repeated, do not originate in this source.
Spain, in the illusion of her prosperity, and with the chimerical design to appropriate to herself the riches and productions of the new world she had just acquired, not only prohibited all trade with foreign countries, but likewise threw obstacles in the way of the traffic the natives might establish among themselves. Although, by the edict of Charles I. dated in 1529, the commerce of the Indies was to be divided between the different ports of the ocean and Mediterranean, to the end that its advantages should be circulated through all
