great "increase of trade."

The power of coinage was limited to the royal mints, and arrangements were made for establishing throughout the kingdom a uniform system of weights and measures. Numerous oppressive tolls and monopolies were abolished, and the alcavala, a tax upon exchanges, which previously had been arbitrary, was now fixed at ten per cent.

The habit of association now growing rapidly, with great development of individuality, the mercantile marine, at the close of the century, amounted to a thousand vessels; and the woollen and silk fabrics of Toledo gave employment to ten thousand workmen. Segovia manufactured fine cloths, while Granada and Valencia produced silks and velvets; and Valladolid became remarkable for its curiously wrought plate and fine cutlery, while the manufactures of Barcelona rivalled those of Venice. The fair of Medina del Campo became the great mart for the exchanges of the peninsula; and the quays of Seville began to be thronged with merchants from the remotest parts of Europe. The impulse thus given being speedily felt in the arrangements for intellectual improvement, ancient seminaries were remodelled, and new ones were created-all swarming with disciples, and giving employment to more printing-presses than exist in Spain at the present day.

Union at home gave, however, power to sovereigns who desired, most unhappily, to use it for the destruction of the habit of association abroad and for centralizing in their own hands the direction of the modes of action and of thought of all their subjects. Millions of the most industrious people of the kingdom among whom individuality was developed to an extent then unknown in any other part of Europe-were expelled for differences of belief; and thus was the incipient motion of society to a great extent arrested. That, in its turn, tended greatly to facilitate the recruitment of armies to be employed in the work of plundering Italy and the Netherlands, Mexico and Peru; and the greater the tendency to dispersion, the more rapid proved to be the reduction in the compensation of honest labor. The more numerous the armies, the greater was the growth of splendor, and of weakness; and the result is seen in the fact that, for a hundred and fifty years, Madrid has been the focus of intrigues having reference to the question whether France or England should have the

direction of its government and the kingdom has been impoverished by repeated wars for the determination of the succession to its throne. In the effort to destroy all power of selfgovernment abroad, Spain had lost all individuality at home.* Mistress of the Indies, she was too weak to preserve command over her own Gibraltar; and she has now for more than a century been forced to see it held for the sole and exclusive purpose of enabling foreigners to set at naught her laws. In every page of her history we find confirmation of the lesson that had before been taught by Athens and Sparta, Carthage and Romethat if we desire to command respect for our own rights, we can do so only on condition of respecting those of others.†

§ 11. For more than a thousand years, the sovereigns, nobles, and gentlemen of FRANCE have been engaged in the effort to destroy the power of association in, and among, the various nations of

That the folly of oppression is equal to its wickedness, is proved by every page in the history of Spain, but in none more clearly than in those which record the proceedings of the Duke of Alva in the Netherlands, thus described in Mr. Motley's recent work:

"During the daily decimation of the people's lives, he thought a daily decimation of their industry possible. His persecutions swept the land of those industrious classes which had made it the rich and prosperous commonwealth it had been so lately; while, at the same time, he found a Peruvian mine,' as he pretended, in the imposition of a tenth penny upon every one of its commercial transactions. He thought that a people, crippled as this had been by the operations of a Blood Council, could pay ten per cent., not annually, but daily, not upon its income, but upon its capital; not once only, but every time the value constituting capital changed hands. He boasted that he should require no funds from Spain, but that, on the contrary, he should make annual remittances to the royal treasury at home, from the proceeds of his imposts and confiscations; yet, notwithstanding these resources, and notwithstanding twenty-five millions of gold, in five years, sent by Philip from Madrid, the exchequer of the provinces was barren and bankrupt, when his successor arrived. Requesens found neither a penny in the public treasury, nor the means of raising one."— Rise of the Dutch Republic, vol. ii. p. 103.

"The Spaniard alone in Europe has retained the faculty of looking at a nation's acts as those of a man, and appreciating it thereby. He does not ask what it says or intends, or what food it eats, or how many servants it has. He looks at its dealings with himself. The Spaniard knows that his two neighbors, for one hundred and forty years, have been seeking to rob and overreach him; plotting, one day, the partition of his property — the next, the supplanting of his heir; constantly engaged in intrigues amongst his servants, and the one or the other insisting on ruining his steward. He sees that, during all that time, they have gained nothing; but while injuring him, have themselves squandered incalculable fortunes and innumerable lives what can he feel towards them but hatred and disgust ?"-Urquhart: Pillars of Hercules, vol. i. p. 48

the world; as is shown in the histories of the Netherlands and Germany, Spain and Italy, India and Egypt, Northern and Southern America. The study of that nation, more uninterruptedly than that of almost any other recorded in history, has been to increase the machinery of trade and to destroy the power to maintain commerce. Swords have abounded, while spades were rare; and ships of war have been numerous, while roads were bad, and canals had no existence. Camps have everywhere grown as towns and villages decayed, and gentlemen have become more numerous as ploughmen disappeared. The soil they cultivated has, however, borne

"Dead Sea fruits, that tempt the eye,

But turn to ashes on the lips"—

the crop that has been harvested having been, invariably, weakness, disgrace, and almost ruin.

The history of that country is a record of a series of interferences with the rights of other communities, rarely intermitted except when it has itself been rendered powerless for injury abroad by the existence of disturbances at home. Pepin and Charlemagne, having sought glory in Italy and Germany, bequeathed to their successors a kingdom so exhausted as to be entirely incapable of defence against a few Norman pirates, and a kingly power wholly unable to sustain itself against the robber chiefs by whom its sovereigns were surrounded. As a consequence, the social system became resolved into its original elements; and it is to the anarchy which then existed that historians have given the pompous title of "The Feudal System," where system there was none.

Population and wealth grew very slowly, but with their growth may be observed a gradual approach towards the re-establishment of a central power-a sun to the system, around which might peacefully revolve the various parts of French society; but accompanied, as we see to have been the case in Spain, by a strong desire to use the power thus acquired for the prevention of motion in societies abroad. Louis IX. squandered the resources of his kingdom in carrying war into the East; and his successors employed themselves in disturbing the repose of their neighbors of the West-invading their territories, plundering their towns and

cities, and murdering the inhabitants. The constant pursuit of glory being, however, attended by increasing weakness at home, but little time elapsed before English armies were seen repeating on the soil of France the scenes of plunder and devastation that she, herself, had enacted abroad- occupying her capital, and dictating laws to her people. The reign of anarchy having again returned, all power of voluntary association disappeared.

Again, under Louis XI., we meet with some approach towards the reorganization of society — followed, however, by repeated invasions of the neighboring countries; and now, again, the effect of unceasing war is seen in the almost perfect chaos of which it was the cause, as exhibited in the closing reigns of the House of Valois, when, the kingly power having almost disappeared, foreign armies fearlessly invaded France, incapable of resistance.

Once again, and for the fourth time, society became, in some degree, reorganized under the Bourbon Henry IV., and his descendants. With the resuscitation of power, returned, however, the desire for its exercise to the injury of the communities around. Centralization grew with the growth of armies, and the exhaustion of the people increased with the increase of splendor in the throne; but now, again, we see splendor and weakness travelling together the closing years of the reign of Louis XIV. having been embittered by the necessity for begging a peace that was refused except on terms to be dictated by Marlborough and Prince Eugene.*

* "Vauban and Boisguilbert have described in the most pathetic terms the melancholy reduction of the productive power of France in these deplorable times. Nothing,' as they said, 'remained to the people but their eyes with which to shed tears;' and we cannot hesitate to believe in the reality of their misfortunes, confirmed as they are by such unexceptionable witnesses. Such was the state of things at the death of Louis. Down to his last moment, the government had been kept alive only by means of the most wretched expedients. To obtain some little money from the new employés, the ministry had been compelled to create numerous ridiculous offices; and while England and Holland could borrow at three or four per cent., the farmers of the revenue charged the king of France ten, twenty, and even fifty, per cent. The enormous taxation had exhausted the country, deprived as it had been of laborers by reason of the demands for the war; commerce had almost ceased to exist; and manufactures, decimated by the proscription of the Protestants, seemed condemned to lose all the conquests for which they had been indebted to the genius of Colbert."-BLANQUI: Histoire d'Economie Politique, vol. ii. 65.

The wars of Louis XV. and XVI. next paved the way for the Revolution, in the course of which all kingly authority disappeared the great-grandson of the founder of Versailles being seen, in the Place de la Revolution, paying forfeit with his head. for all the previous splendor of the throne. Order again, and for the fifth time, re-established, we find the whole effort of the country once more given to the destruction of all power of association among the various communities of Europe. Again were Spain and Italy, the Netherlands and Germany, desolated by invading armies; and again did France exhibit the effect of constant interference with the movement of others in utter weakness at home-her capital having twice been occupied by foreign armies

and her throne having twice been filled by direction of foreign sovereigns.*

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*

*

* "From 1803 to 1815, twelve campaigns cost us nearly a million of men, who died in the field of battle, or in the prisons, or on the roads, or in the hospitals, and six thousand millions of francs. "Two invasions destroyed or consumed, on the soil of old France, fifteen hundred millions of raw products, or of manufactures, of houses, of workshops, of machines, and of animals, indispensable to agriculture, to manufactures, or to commerce. As the price of peace, in the name of the alliance, our country has seen herself compelled to pay fifteen hundred additional millions, that she might not too soon regain her well-being, her splendor, and her power. Behold, in twelve years, nine thousand millions of francs" (seventeen hundred millions of dollars) "taken from the productive industry of France and lost for ever. We found ourselves thus dispossessed of all our conquests, and with two hundred thousand strangers encamped on our territory, where they lived, at the expense of our glory and of our fortune, until the end of the year 1818." - Dupin.

As a consequence of this enormous waste of wealth and population, commerce scarcely existed between the several parts of the kingdom, as is seen by the following statements, made a few years later by an eminent French engineer:-"I have frequently traversed, in different departments, twenty square leagues, without meeting with a canal, a road, a factory, or even an inhabited estate. The country seemed a place of exile abandoned to the miserable, whose interests and whose wants are equally misunderstood, and whose distress is constantly increasing, because of the low prices of their products, and the cost of transportation. Cordier.

The following view of the condition of a large portion of the people of France, in the present day, is from the pen of M. Blanqui, successor of M. J. B. Say in his professorship; and was written after a careful examination of the various provinces of the kingdom.

"Whatever diversity exists in the soil occupied by the people, in their customs, aptitudes, dispositions, the salient, characteristic fact of their situation is wretchedness -a general insufficiency of the means of satisfying even the first necessities of life. One is surprised how small is the consumption of these myriads of human beings. They constitute, however, the majority of the tax-payers; and the slightest difference in their favor, of income, would not merely benefit them, but vastly advance all fortunes and the prosperity of the state. Those alone who have seen it can believe the degree