^8 MEXICO. more insupportable. To receive their supplies through the medium of the Peninsula would not have been a hardship, had she taken, in return, those products, in which the Colo- nies abounded, and upon which the whole wealth of some of them depended. But this she would only do to a very li- mited extent.* Payments in specie were the great object of the Spanish merchant, and to this every other commercial advantage was sacrificed. The exclusion of foreigners from concurrence, in a market thus organized, was essential to the very existence of the system pursued. Their willingness to receive produce in lieu of silver, in exchange for their manufactures, and to be con- tented with a moderate rate of profit upon those manufac- tures, provided they could dispose of them in sufficient quan- tities, would have rendered competition, on the part of Spain, impossible, at the same time that it must have increased the difficulty of keeping the Colonies in subjection, by aug- menting their resources too rapidly. The whole attention of Spain was therefore directed to this point. For a long time, she claimed a right to an exclusive dominion over the vast oceans surrounding her American possessions ; and this right she asserted, to the utmost extent, wherever she was enabled to do so by a superiority of maritime force. Few are, I believe, aware of the length to which these pretensions were carried. I shall therefore subjoin, in order to illustrate them, some extracts from a correspondence which took place, as late as 1790, between Don Teodoro de Croix, then Viceroy of Peru, and the Governor of the Island of Juan Fernandez, who was disgraced, and narrowly escaped a severer punishment, for having, in that year, allowed a vessel from the United States, which had lost her rudder,
- A return of the importations and exportations from the colonies,
would prove how very small was the amount of colonial produce export- ed from each, (with the exception of the Havanna,) and how constant the drain of specie.
