ntury; but nations are only aggregates of
men, and what makes an individual rich, cannot make a nation poor.
The true secret is this--that while the possession of the gold mines
induced an indolent government to rely upon them for the expenses of
the state, that reliance led them to abandon sources of profit in the
agriculture and commerce of the country, which were of ten times the
value. This was equally the case in Spain. The first influx from the
mines of Peru, enabled the government to disregard the revenues
arising from the industry of the people. In consequence of the want
of encouragement from the government, the agriculture and commerce of
Spain sank rapidly into the lowest condition, whilst the government
indolently lived on the produce of the mines. But the more gold and
silver exist in circulation, the less becomes their value. Within
half a century, the imports from the Spanish and Portuguese mines,
had reduced the value of the precious metals by one half; and those
imports thus became inadequate to the ordinary expenses of
government. Greater efforts were then made to obtain them from the
mines. Still, as the more that was obtained the less was the general
value, the operation became more profitless still; and at length both
Spain and Portugal were reduced to borrow money, which they had no
means to pay--in other words, were bankrupt. And this is the true
solution of the problem--why have the gold and silver mines of the
Peninsula left them the poorest nations of Europe? Yet this was
contrary to the operation of new wealth. The discovery of the mines
of the New World appears to have been a part of that providential
plan, by which a general impulse was communicated to Europe in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Europe was preparing for a new
vigour of religion, politics, commerce, and civilization. Nothing
stimulates national effort of every kind with so much power and
rapidity, as a new general accession of wealth, or, as the political
economist would pronounce it, a rise of wages, whether industrial or
intellectual; and this rise was effected by the new influx of the
mines. If Peru and Mexico had belonged to England, she would have
converted their treasures into new canals and high-roads, new
harbours, new encouragements to agriculture, new excitements to
public education, new enterprises of commerce, or the colonization of
new countries in the productive regions of the globe; and thus she
would at o