336 MEXICO. for, in order to determine whether the demand for the pro- ducts of European industry in Mexico, has already reached its full, or natural extent, it is necessary to ascertain what the state of the country was in 1824, and in how far its resources may be said to have developed themselves in the course of the last two years. In 1824, Mexico may be said to have commenced its reco- very from the effects of a Civil war of fourteen years' dura- tion, in the course of which the country had been not only, exhausted, but gradually drained of a very large proportion of its capital. The Old Spaniards, in whose hands this capi- tal had accumulated, began, at a very early period of the struggle for Independence, to provide for a contingency, the . probability of which they foresaw, by transferring the great bulk of their convertible property to Europe. Some, indeed, remained, and retained a sufficient portion of their funds to give a certain activity to trade, and to promote particular branches of industry; but even the most hardy withdrew as soon as the separation from the Mother-country , became inevitable, and, in the years 1821 and 1822, the whole remaining surplus capital of Mexico, was, if I may use the «xpression, abstracted from the circulation. Of the amount of this capital no exact estimate can be ob- tained, a great part of it having been conveyed out of the country by secret channels.* The Mexicans affirm that it exceeded one hundred millions of dollars ; (the calculations of the best informed of those whom I have consulted upon the subject, varying from eighty, to one hundred and forty mil- lions,) a very large proportion of which was actually exported in gold or silver. This sudden diminution of the circulating medium could only have occurred in a Colony, compelled, like Mexico, by peculiar circumstances, to depend, in a great measure, upon a
- I shall have occasion to investigate this subject more accurately in
Book IV.
