[Illustration:  POTOSI, IN BOLIVIA.

The famous centre of the silver-mining region which supplied the Spanish
Empire with bullion for three centuries.

From a seventeenth-century engraving.]

Yet the climate, or some obscure effect of the mingling and cross-breeding of conquerors and conquered, seems to have paralyzed human effort in these colonies of the northern coast.  The land was something of an earthly paradise, and men were tempted to doze in it rather than to develop its resources.  The cacao of Venezuela takes first place in the markets of the world, and has done so since its initial cultivation there; but not one-tenth of the area available for the growth of the bean has ever been utilized.

Caracas itself, earthquake shaken from time to time, was never—­even in the most favourable periods of colonial rule—­a flourishing city, but rather a centre of trade for scattered settlements.  The town could claim little literary or educational movement to mark it as the capital of a potentially rich country.  It was concerned, moreover, with scarcely a trace of the social and erudite development that characterized Bogota almost from the time of its foundation by Quesada.  In so far as it had to be, Caracas existed, but there its ambition ended.

Except for some isolated centres, this was true of the whole of New Granada and Venezuela.  Under Spanish rule the Viceroyalty and its dependent Captain-Generalship formed a great area into which Spaniards had come to hunt for mineral wealth, and while that wealth was obtainable there was a vast amount of activity.  The aborigines, save for the Chibcha race, numbered among them some of the lowest types on the Continent, and where gold or emeralds or other valuable minerals were to be obtained these unfortunates were pressed into service, or rather into slavery.

When the minerals were exhausted, enterprise ceased.  Sufficient cultivation for material needs—­an easy matter in this productive land—­was carried on, and in certain districts a definite amount of cacao growing was practised.  For the rest, little was achieved, while farther south development was proceeding along the lines which have brought into being the great republics of to-day.

Then Venezuela gave to South America Simon Bolivar, and the storm of revolution which swept the Continent shook these northern dependencies into transient wakefulness and energy, until the great day of Boyaca dawned, and New Granada and Venezuela, as Spanish colonies, ceased to be.  Fit or unfit as they might have been for self-government at the time, these peoples set out to make histories as independent States, and the Spanish colonial era, having lasted over two and a half centuries, came to an end.

CHAPTER XV

THE LAST DAYS OF EMPIRE