wrought to infinitely more advantage; for those already discovered and now neglected, would be sufficient to employ 40,000 men.  It may also be observed, that the frauds practised against the royal revenue are increasing daily, and, as the riches of the Spanish West Indies are measured by the amount of the royal revenue, this must make them appear poorer than they are in reality.  We have one instance of this in the mines of Potosi, which are said to produce less silver than they did formerly; yet, on a computation for fifty years, the annual revenue to the king has amounted, on the average, to 220,000 pesos, of thirteen rials and a quarter yearly, which shews that the annual produce of these mines, so far as it has paid the royal duty, amounts nearly to two million pieces of eight, or dollars, and it may be confidently asserted that the royal treasury does not receive above half of what is due:  wherefore, from this example, the rest may be judged of.

[Footnote 8:  The coin or denomination is not specified:  If dollars, at 4s. 6d., this would amount to four millions and a half sterling.—­E.]

Sec. 7. SOME ACCOUNT OF THE FRENCH INTERLOPERS IN CHILI.

As the policy of Spain chiefly consists in endeavouring, by all possible means, to prevent the riches of these extensive dominions from passing into other hands, so the knowledge possessed by other nations of the great wealth of these countries, and of the great demand for European manufactures among their inhabitants, has excited almost every nation in Europe to devise every possible contrivance for coming in for a share in these riches, and this with such effect, that it is even questionable whether any considerable portion of the riches of the new world centres among the inhabitants of Old Spain.  This may be judged of from the following considerations:  Even the trade carried on from Spain to the new world is of much greater importance to foreigners than to the Spaniards themselves.  For as Spain has few commodities of its own, and carries on scarcely any manufactures, the Spanish merchants at Cadiz have to make up their cargoes by means of purchases from other countries; or rather the Cadiz merchants are mere factors for the merchants of England, France, and Holland, whose goods they send to America, and pay them by the returns made in the Plate fleets.  Spain also is a country very ill provided with some of the necessaries of life, and most of the conveniences; so that prodigious sums of the money brought from America have to be yearly exported for the purchase of these.

Besides such drawbacks as the above, to which the Spaniards willingly submit, there are many others which they are forced to endure:  For instance, all the negroes they employ in their plantations, in which every kind of labour is performed by them, are purchased from foreigners, particularly the English and Dutch, at a very large annual expence; and, under pretence of furnishing them with negroes, a clandestine trade is carried on every year, along the whole coasts of their possessions on the Atlantic.  In the South Sea, however, they were tolerably free from every thing except the depredations of pirates, till the general war on account of the succession to the crown of Spain, which created a new kind of contraband trade, unknown in former times, of which I now propose to give some account.