sent, to demonstrate the wealth, to which, under more favourable circumstances, the principal families of the Republic will find themselves restored: but time alone is wanting in order to bring things round to their natural level; the seeds of opulence are there, and, in proportion as the country advances towards a more settled order of things, the period approaches, at which they may be again expected to produce their former fruits.
Melancholy, indeed, would be the fate of Mexico, if the source from which all her riches have hitherto been derived, were, as some suppose, exhausted and dried up! She could not only find no substitute for her mines in her Foreign Trade, of which they furnish the great staple, Silver, but her resources at home would decrease, in exactly the same proportion as her means of supplying her wants from abroad. Her Agriculture would be confined to such a supply of the necessaries of life, as each individual would have it in his power to raise;—Districts, formerly amongst the richest in the known world, would be thrown for ever out of cultivation;—the great Mining towns would become, what they were during the worst years of the Revolution, the picture of desolation; and the country, would be so far thrown back in the career of civilization, that the great majority of its inhabitants would be compelled to revert to a Nomade life, and to seek a precarious subsistence amidst their flocks and herds, like the Gaucho of the Pampas, of whose Indian habits Captain Head
