SECTION IV.
SOME GENERAL OBSERVATIONS UPON MEXICO AS A MINING COUNTRY; WITH AN INQUIRY AS TO THE PROBABILITY OF HER BEING ENABLED BY HER MINERAL TREASURES TO MULTIPLY HER COMMERCIAL RELATIONS WITH EUROPE, AND TO ACQUIT THE INTEREST OF WHATEVER LOANS SHE MAY HAVE CONTRACTED THERE.
It is to Baron Humboldt's Essai Politique that Europe is indebted for whatever knowledge it now possesses of the peculiarites by which Mexico is distinguished as a Mining country. How little was known before his time may be inferred from the fact, that Robertson, celebrated, as he so justly is, for the diligence and accuracy of his researches, in his view of the Colonial Policy of Spain, confounds, every where, the climate of Mexico with that of Peru and Chile, and deplores the mortality occasioned amongst the natives, (whom he supposes to have been compelled to work in the mines,) "by the sudden transition from the sultry climate of the valleys, to the chill, penetrating air, peculiar to high lands in the torrid zone." I need hardly state that, the idea is a mistaken one; and that however miserable the lot of those poor wretches may be, whose sufferings, amidst the eternal snows of the Andes, (at Upsallata, and San Pedro Nostoli,) Captain Head so forcibly describes, there is no sort of analogy between their situation, and that of the mining population of New Spain. Compulsory labour has never been known there; and the temperature of Zacatecas and Guanajuato,
