nce have increased her natural opulence, and saved herself
from suffering under the depreciation of the precious metals, or more
partially, by her active employment of them, have almost wholly
prevented that depreciation. But the Peninsula, relying wholly on its
imported wealth, and neglecting its infinitely more important
national riches, was exactly in the condition of an individual, who
spends the principal of his property, which is continually sinking
until it is extinguished altogether.

Another source of Peninsular poverty existed in its religion. The
perpetual holidays of Popery made even the working portion of the
people habitually idle. Where labour is prohibited for nearly a
fourth of the year by the intervention of holidays, and thus idleness
is turned into a sacred merit, the nation must prepare for beggary.
But Popery goes further still. The establishment of huge communities
of sanctified idlers, monks and nuns by the ten thousand, in every
province and almost in every town, gave a sacred sanction to
idleness--gave a means of escaping work to all who preferred the
lounging and useless life of the convent to regular labour, and even
provided the means of living to multitudes of vagabonds, who were
content to eat their bread, and drink their soup, daily at the
convent gates, rather than to make any honest decent effort to
maintain themselves. Every country must be poor in which a large
portion of the public property goes to the unproductive classes. The
soldiery, the monks, the state annuitants, the crowds of domestics,
dependent on the families of the grandees, all are necessarily
unproductive. The money which they receive is simply consumed. It
makes no return. Thus poverty became universal; and nothing but the
singular fertility of the peopled districts of Spain and Portugal,
and the fortune of having a climate which requires but few of the
comforts essential in a severer temperature, could have saved them
both from being the most pauperized of all nations, or even from
perishing altogether, and leaving the land a desert behind them. It
strangely illustrates these positions, that, in 1754, the Portuguese
treasury was so utterly emptied, that the monarch was compelled to
borrow 400,000 crusadoes (L.40,000) from a private company, for the
common expenses of his court.

Wholly and justly disclaiming the imputation which would pronounce
Portugal a dependent on England, it is impossible to turn a page of
her