they preserved their state, yet their powers were, at the period of which we are speaking, but little more extensive then those of a Captain-General.

These great commands were usually bestowed upon noblemen of distinguished families in Spain, or courtiers to whom they afforded opportunities of acquiring wealth in various ways, legal and illegal, which appear to have been seldom neglected. As such persons could not be supposed to be, in all cases, very well prepared for the duties of their situation, and as ambition or rapacity might tempt them to proceed beyond the bounds prescribed by law or wisdom for their conduct, they, as well as the Governors and Intendants, were provided with Fiscales or attornies, whom they were obliged to consult before taking any important step; each might act contrary to the opinion of his Fiscal, but the latter had the right to enter his protest, which might afterwards be submitted to the Supreme Council. As an additional check, it was also provided, that, after the retirement of a Viceroy, Captain-General, or Governor, from his command, he might, within a certain short period, be arraigned for his misconduct while in office; and for this purpose, a Commissioner was appointed to receive any complaints which might be brought against him.

The most serious check upon the absoluteness or the ambition of all the executive officers, were the Audiencias or high Courts of Justice, of which one or two were established in every section. They consisted each of a small number, generally between three and eight, of Oidores or judges, aided by Fiscales, chancellors, notaries, Alguaziles or sheriffs, and other officers or agents. On ordinary occasions, they were presided over by one of their number, styled a Regent; the Viceroy or Captain-General was, however, ex-officio, the President of the Audiencia established in his capital. In one section, that of Quito, the President of the Audiencia exercised the chief civil power, the military force being subordinate to the Viceroy of New Grenada. These powerful bodies were at first merely high courts of justice, but they gradually acquired the prerogatives of Councils of State and Boards of Administration; they, in fact, became the immediate representatives of the Council of the Indies, and the government of the countries was really placed in their hands. Appeals might be made to them from the decisions, and complaints might be brought on account of the procedings, of all other authorities, and their judgments were reversible only by the Supreme Council itself. To this latter tribunal recourse could be had under certain circumstances and conditions; but that was seldom done, as the appellant was obliged previously to deposite a very large sum of money, which was forfeited in case the final sentence should be against him, and the prosecution of such suits was always tedious and enormously expensive.

As the decisions of the Audiencia were thus almost final with regard to acts committed, and as they possessed the right of directly addressing the Supreme Council, with which their representations were of almost paramount influence, it may be readily supposed that their opinions and advice before action would have great weight. Accordingly the Viceroys and Captains-General rarely proceeded in opposition to their opinion; and when they did so, they were generally declared by the supreme powers to have been in the wrong. Nay, more, the history of Spanish America presents several instances in which such Chiefs have been arrested and deposed by the Audiencias, the latter assuming the reins of government in their stead, until the will of the monarch could be known.

In the administration of justice, in ordinary cases of difference among private individuals, and even between such and the Executive officers, it seems to have been considered that the Audiencias generally acted with uprightness, and that they often proved effectual checks to the tyranny and rapacity of those officers; on the other hand, their members appear every where to have behaved with more arrogance towards the people, and to have been more generally feared and hated by them, than any other public officers. When the disposition to dispute the authority of Spain was first manifested in America, the most energetic measures were every where counselled or taken by the Audiencias; the greatest degree of severity was exhibited by them towards the offenders, and they in turn were visited by the utmost violence of popular revenge.

The military force in America consisted of regulars, who were nearly all Spaniards, and of native militia. Neither class of troops was, however, at any time very numerous; the government appearing to have but little dread of foreign attacks, and to place full confidence in the organization of its civil powers, for preventing internal disturbances.

The ecclesiastical establishment was an important branch of the government of America, where it was maintained in great splendor and dignity. The clergy presented the same characteristics there as in other countries where the Roman Catholic religion prevailed exclusively; the inferior members being generally honest, kind, and simple-minded persons, loving and loved by their parishioners, while the high dignitaries were, for the most part, arrogant, intriguing and tyrannical. The Inquisition exercised its detestable sway, unchecked in every part of the dominions; occasionally exhibiting to the people of the great cities the edifying spectacle of an auto de fé, in which human victims were sacrificed, to confirm the faith of the beholders in the power of the Archbishop and the Viceroy.

With regard to taxation, the Americans can scarcely be said to have labored under heavier grievances than the inhabitants of Spain; as in the latter country the revenues were raised through complicated proceedings, by means of fines, salos of offices, monopolies, custom-house duties, excises, and taxes of various sorts and denominations; to which were added, in America, the tribute paid by the Indians, the percentage on the precious metals obtained from the mines, and some other peculiar imposts. The principal duties and taxes were the Almojarifazgo orduty on entry of goods, the Alcabala or tax on sales and transfers of property, and the millones or duties on things most necessary for human subsistance; the monopolies extended to the articles of less immediate necessity, such as tobacco, brandy, quicksilver, &c. The mines were granted to individuals by the Sovereign, in whom the right to them originally lay, on condition of the regular payment to the Government of a certain proportion of the metals extracted; the exportation of their products to any other country than Spain was especially prohibited. That the internal commerce of a country subject to such a mode of taxation as the Alcabala cannot possibly flourish, no arguments are required to prove; the millones, and monopolies, were scarcely less calculated to repress enterprise among the people; but on the other hand, independently of the sums raised, they afforded offices for Spaniards, which was a more important consideration in the eyes of the Government, than the comforts and happiness of the subjects.

Besides the contributions thus levied by the civil Government, alone sufficient utterly to weigh down the energies of any people, the Church obtained a large portion of the produce of the labor of the inhabitants, in the shape of tithes, and by the salecarried on to an extent unknown in any other part of the world of bulls of indulgence; which the clear-sighted and caustic Jovellanos characterises as "periodical productions, badly written on bad paper, which every body bought, few read, and nobody could understand."

The Indians residing in separate villages and parishes, were freed from the alcabala, and the other direct taxes, in place of which they paid a tribute, or capitation tax of from five to ten dollars, levied upon every male between ten and fifty years old, and collected by their Corregidores. In this respect they were, therefore, in a better situation than the whites, or those who shared their privileges; and indeed upon the whole, in every part of the dominions except Peru, they suffered less of what might be termed physical oppression, than the other classes of the population. In Peru, however, their fate was dreadful; each village in that section was obliged to furnish a certain number of men, who were chosen by lot, to work in the mines for a year, during which short space of time they were generally destroyed by the peculiar nature of their labour, or their constitutions were entirely broken. This forced contribution of labor, was called the mita; it was supposed to have been one of the principal causes of the rapid depopulation of Peru, and to free themselves from it was the great motive of the insurgents, who, under the command of the pretended Inca Tupac Amru, laid waste that country in 1780.

The commerce of these countries with each other was discouraged, and, in general, absolutely prohibited; between them and Spain it was carried on by a limited number of vessels, which were required to be almost entirely owned and manned by Spaniards, and were permitted to sail only to and from certain ports; with the rest of the world they could have no intercourse whatever but by stealth. Foreigners were prohibited, under the heaviest penalties, from entering any part of Spanish America, or from appearing in the vicinity of its coasts; and a foreign vessel, even though belonging to a country at peace with Spain, arriving under any circumstances in a Spanish-American port, was liable to be seized, and her crew might be killed, or imprisoned for life in the mines, or sent far into the interior of the country. These impediments, however, proved insufficient to restrain the enterprise of the British, the French, and the Americans, who introduced vast quantities of the productions of their own or other lands into those dominions, not only clandestinely, but even under the eyes of the authorities, previously rendered propitious by bribes and carried away, in return, the precious metals which it was so much the object of the government to secure for Spain.

It may readily be imagined, that the diffusion of information among the inhabitants was studiously prevented. The charge of keeping them in ignorance was committed to the priests, who, with the exception of the Jesuits, executed it with fidelity; the few schools and colleges were directed solely by ecclesiastics, who excluded from the course of instruction every branch of study, and from the public and private libraries every book, calculated to strengthen the mental faculties or to elevate the feelings. In the year 1806, there were but two printing presses in all Spanish America, one at Lima, the other at Mexico, in each of which cities a newspaper was published, under the immediate direction of the Government; and as the Spanish newspapers, the only ones allowed to be imported, were devoted almost wholly to the movements of the Court or the Church, the inhabitants remained in absolute ignorance of all that transpired elsewhere. A few poems and plays, none of any value, and some works on natural history, or speculations, generally wild and baseless, on the antiquities of those countries, form nearly the whole of their original literature.

The incomplete outline here given of the system by which these countries were governed, at the time when that system was the most liberal, and perhaps, in general, the most liberally administered, may serve to afford some idea of the evils to which they were subjected before their separation from Spain-evils by no means productive of proportional advantage to the oppressors. A more minute review of the history of Spanish supremacy in America, would serve to show that, throughout the whole period of its subsistence, the wishes and welfare of the inhabitants were sacrificed to the interests, real or supposed, of the monarch or of his European subjects. To secure those interests permanently was the great object of the Government, and, unfortunately for America, they were considered as being confined within very narrow limits; in fact, it had long been established as a principle, that to supply Spain with the greatest quantity of the precious metals, and to gratify her nobility and influential persons by lucrative situations for themselves or their dependants, were the only purposes for which these countries could be rendered available without endangering the perpetuity of the dominion over them.

With regard to the Council of the Indies, it is not difficult to conceive that the accumulation of all the powers of the state in the hands of such a close corporation, composed of persons who were, in every respect, foreigners residing in a foreign country, and not associated by interests or feelings with those whom they governed, could not be otherwise than disadvantageous to the latter. The contrary, however, has been maintained by many, who havelauded the proceedings of this body on the grounds, not only of their general wisdom, but also of their justice, their moderation, their humane and benevolent spirit. The laws of the Indies do, indeed, in many instances, appear to warrant this favorable judgment; but the advantages held out by some of those enactments were often neutralized by others of a directly contrary tendency; or by the great liberty of construction allowed to those who were charged with their execution; while other provisions, upon points of the utmost importance to the welfare of the governed, though clearly expressed, were so uniformly disregarded, as to authorise the suspicion that they were framed solely for the purpose of delusion. Thus, it is declared and recommended in many of their decrees, that the utmost equality should subsist between white natives of the Indies and Spaniards, in the privilege of being chosen to fill all offices in that Empire; rarely, however, was this just and generous precept observed; the Americans were excluded from almost all employments and dignities in their country, whether civil, ecclesiastical or military, which were, with but few exceptions, uniformly bestowed on Spaniards. Of a hundred and sixty persons who successively commanded in the various sections as Viceroys, but four were natives of America, and of more than six hundred Captains-General and Presidents of Audiencias, only fourteen were born in the western hemisphere. No disposition was shewn during the latter years of the Spanish domination to lessen this evil; on the contrary, the removal of all Americans who held offices in those countries, was a prominent part of the reform made at the suggestion of the minister Galvez, in the government of the Indies, between 1785 and 1790.

The agents thus chosen to direct the administration of affairs in those countries, appear to have been, in most cases, by no means fitted, either by their capacity, their habits, or their character, for the employments to which they were destined. Regarding themselves as a privileged class, they were uniformly insolent to the people, and their general rapacity and venality is proved by the concurrent testimony of all who had the means of observing their conduct. In these liberties, the inferior officers were encouraged by the example of their chiefs, and by their indifference to complaints; while their extortions were facilitated by the imperfections in the laws, which every agent appeared to have assumed the right of interpreting according to his own views and interests. “God is on high and the King far off," was the ruling maxim with the Viceroys and Captains-General; and the conviction of impunity, thus expressed, was equally entertained by their subordinates in every degree.

It is true, as has been stated, that the Audiencias proved in many instances a salutary check upon the tyranny of the executive officers; but this could be only in cases in which complaints were brought before it, and which could rarely occur, on account of the vast extent of the sections, and the expense of prosecuting such suits. We have shewn the difficulties which rendered an appeal to the Council of the Indies impracticable, except in a very few cases; a direct application to this body, for redress of injuries sustained from any Government officer, was nearly impossible, as no letter could be received from any of those countries unless it was sent by the Viceroy, Captain-General, or President of the Audiencia. Equally vain was any attempt to impeach those Chiefs during the short period allowed for that purpose after their retirement from office; so that the American subjects of Spain had no effective remedy whatever against oppression and tyranny on the part of their immediate

rulers.

Such was the plan of the Spanish Government in America. In theory it was simple and not positively bad; in its operation, however, it was, in every point of view, inefficient and oppressive, as must be every system of rule, however perfect in conception, where the people to whom it is applied have no voice in its constitution and direction; where measures are all adopted without their sanction, and the agents are not amenable to their judgment. In no other part of what we call the civilized world, have the people possessed less share in the direction of their civil concerns than in these countries; the history of no other part presents such an uninterrupted series of examples of abuse and misgovernment.

That such a system was calculated to paralyze the prosperity of those countries cannot be doubted; and indeed this was evidently the intention of the Spanish Government, which was well assured that, under a form of administration better adapted to develope their resources, they would soon cease to form part of its dominions. This separation was anticipated by many of Spain's wisest statesmen, who had in vain endeavoured to prevail upon the ruling powers to provide for its occurrence, by adopting measures likely to produce a friendly spirit on the part of the Americans towards the mother country. The warnings were, however, disregarded, and to the

last moment of the existence of the Spanish authority on the Western Continent, the same selfish and uncompromising views were manifested by those who maintained it, and not a step was taken by them to render the inhabitants fitted for self-govern

ment.

On the character of the Americans the influence of such a government could not but have produced most baleful effects. When oppression does not provoke resist ance, it evidently debases those who submit to it; when force is not or cannot be employed to repel injustice, recourse will be had to falsehood, fraud and subterfuge, in order to elude it, and these, in their turn, lead to haughtiness and tyranny on the part of the rulers, to insolence and venality in their agents. Such was the case throughout these countries, in which hatred and thirst for vengeance rankled in the breast of every native. Are we, then, to be surprised that the struggle for independence was desperate and bloody-and that, when the Americans had succeeded in expelling their tyrants, so few of them were found possessing the habits or the principes requisite for the formation of good citizens, or for the existence of free institutions ?

The first event, worthy of notice, that occurred in the present century, with regard to the Spanish possessions in America, was the separation of Louisiana from the dominion of Spain. This extensive region was explored and settled by the French about the close of the eighteenth century, and was ceded, or as the Spaniards consider, restored to Spain in 1764. It was retroceded to the French in 1801, and transferred by them, on the 30th of April, 1803, to the United States, in direct contravention, as the Spanish government asserted, of the promise made by France at the period of the retrocession.

The loss suffered by Spain, in this diminution of her territory, was a much less serious evil than the establishment of an active and enterprising people in the immediate vicinity of her most valuable provinces, possessing, moreover, the means as well as the right to navigate the sea which bounded them. Her statesmen looked with dread to the consequences which must ensue; the continuation of the exclusive system upon which they conceived that the secure possession of the American dominions was based, would now become impracticable; neither the introduction of prohibited goods, nor the exportation of the precious metals to the United States, could longer be prevented; and the practice of exterminating all foreigners who might enter those countries, could not be prosecuted against citizens of the United States, without eminent hazard of provoking hostilities, either authorized or unauthorized by the government of that Republic. Accordingly, indeed, the country had scarcely been surrendered to the United States, before a plan was formed by their Vice President himself for overthrowing the Spanish authority in Mexico; which, probably, nothing but the want of resolution, on the part of some of the persons engaged, prevented from being carried into execution. Events, however, soon after occurred in other quarters which led to a general catastrophe. The British Government had seen with regret and jealousy this extension of the territories of the United States in Louisiana; and Mr. Pitt, who then directed its affairs, determined, if possible, to procure for his country a share of the Indian empire, the dismemberment of which had been thus begun. With this view he for some time encouraged the plans of General Miranda, a native of Caraceas, who had held a command in the French army, for invading the northern part of South America; but Miranda had no wish to render his native country subject to Great Britain, and was anxious only to see it placed under the government of republican institutions, to which Pitt would of course lend no aid. Thus frustrated, Miranda repaired to the United States, and having, by the assistance of some merchants of New York, obtained the requisite means, he fitted out three vessels, and enlisted, generally under false pretences, nearly four hundred adventurers, with whom he sailed for the Spanish Main in March, 1806. This attempt failed entirely; two of the vessels were taken by the Spaniards, and their crews either put to death or condemned to long and painful imprisonment. Miranda landed with the remainder of his forces on the coast of Caraccas, and invited the people to rally around the stan dard of the new Republic of Colombia; but soon finding his efforts vain, he was glad to make his ercape to the neighbouring British island of Trinidad.