teemed with all that was requisite to the sustenance of the populous cities in their neighborhood."

The inhabitant of modern Spain or Italy, who wanders amid the ruins of their stately cities, their grassgrown streets, their palaces and temples crumbling into dust, their massive bridges choking up the streams they once proudly traversed, the very streams themselves, which bore navies on their bosoms, shrunk into too shallow a channel for the meanest craft to navigate,the modern Spaniard who surveys these vestiges of a giant race, the tokens of his nation's present degeneracy, must turn for relief to the prouder and earlier period of her history, when only such great works

86 Compare, for example, the accounts of the environs of Toledo and Madrid, the two most considerable cities in Castile, by ancient and modern travellers. One of the most intelligent and recent of the latter, in his journey between these two capitals, remarks, "There is sometimes a visible track, and sometimes none; most commonly we passed over wide sands. The country between Madrid and Toledo, I need scarcely say, is ill peopled and ill cultivated; for it is all a part of the same arid plain that stretches on every side around the capital, and which is bounded on this side by the Tagus. The whole of the way to Toledo, I passed through only four inconsiderable villages, and saw two others at a distance. A great part of the land is uncultivated, covered with furze and aromatic plants; but here and there some corn land is to be seen." (Inglis, Spain in 1830, vol. i. p. 366.) What a contrast does all this present to the language of the Italians, Navagiero and Marineo, in whose time the country around Toledo "surpassed all other districts of Spain in the excellence and fruitfulness of the soil;" which," skilfully irrigated by the waters of the Tagus, and minutely cultivated, furnished every variety of fruit and vegetable produce to the neighboring city;" while, instead of the sunburnt plains around Madrid, it is described as situated "in the bosom of a fair country, with an ample territory, yielding rich harvests of corn and wine, and all the other aliments of life." Cosas memorables, fol. 12, 13.-Viaggio fol. 7, 8.

could have been achieved; and it is no wonder that he should be led, in his enthusiasm, to invest it with a romantic and exaggerated coloring. Such a period in Spain cannot be looked for in the last, still less in the seventeenth century, for the nation had then reached the lowest ebb of its fortunes; nor in the close of the sixteenth, for the desponding language of cortes shows that the work of decay and depopulation had then already begun.89 It can only be found in the first half of that century, in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, and that of their successor, Charles the Fifth; in which last, the state, under the strong impulse it had received, was carried onward in the career of pros

44

87 Capmany has well exposed some of these extravagancs. (Mem. de Barcelona, tom. iii. part. 3, cap. 2.) The boldest of them, however, may find a warrant in the declarations of the legislature itself. En los lugares de obrages de lanas," asserts the cortes of 1594, "donde se solian labrar veinte y treinta mil arrobas, no se labran hoi seis, y donde habia señores de ganado de grandísima cantidad, han disminuido en la misma y mayor proporcion, acaeciendo lo mismo en todas las otras cosas del comercio universal y particular. Lo cual hace que no haya ciudad de las principales destos réinos ni lugar ninguno, de donde no falte notable vecindad, como se echa bien de ver en la muchedumbre de casas que estan cerradas y despobladas, y en la baja que han dado los arrendamientos de las pocas que se arriendan y habitan." Apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 304.

88 A point which most writers would probably agree in fixing at 1700, the year of Charles II.'s death, the last and most imbecile of the Austrian dynasty. The population of the kingdom at this time had uwindled to 6,000,000. See Laborde (Itinéraire, tom. vi. pp. 125, 143, ed. 1830), who seems to have better foundation for this census than for most of those in his table.

89 See the unequivocal language of cortes, under Philip II. (supra). With every allowance, it infers an alarming decline in the prosperity

of the nation.

perity, in spite of the ignorance and mismanagement of those who guided it.

There is no country which has been guilty of such wild experiments, or has shown, on the whole, such profound ignorance of the true principles of economical science, as Spain under the sceptre of the family of Austria. And, as it is not always easy to discriminate between their acts and those of Ferdinand and Isabella, under whom the germs of much of the subsequent legislation may be said to have been planted, this circumstance has brought undeserved discredit on the government of the latter. Undeserved, because laws mischievous in their eventual operation were not always so at the time for which they were originally devised; not to add that what was intrinsically bad has been aggravated tenfold under the blind legislation of their successors. It is also true that many of the

90 One has only to read, for an evidence of this, the lib. 6, tit. 18, of the "Nueva Recopilacion," on "cosas prohibidas;" the laws on gilding and plating, lib. 5, tit. 24; on apparel and luxury, lib. 7, tit. 12; on woollen manufactures, lib. 7, tit. 14-17, et leges al. Perhaps no stronger proof of the degeneracy of the subsequent legislation can be given than by contrasting it with that of Ferdinand and Isabella in two important laws. 1. The sovereigns, in 1492, required foreign traders to take their returns in the products and manufactures of the country. By a law of Charles V., in 1552, the exportation of numerous domestic manufactures was prohibited, and the foreign trader, in exchange for domestic wool, was required to import into the country a certain amount of linen and woollen fabrics. 2. By an ordinance, in 1500, Ferdinand and Isabella prohibited the importation of silk thread from Naples, to encourage its production at home. This appears from the tenor of subsequent laws to have perfectly succeeded. In 1552, however, a law was passed interdicting the export of manufactured silk and admitting the importation of the raw material. By this sagacious provision, both the culture of silk and the manufacture were speedily crushed in Castile.

most exceptionable laws sanctioned by their names are to be charged on their predecessors, who had ingrafted their principles into the system long before; " and many others are to be vindicated by the general practice of other nations, which authorized retaliation on the score of self-defence."

Nothing is easier than to parade abstract theoremstrue in the abstract-in political economy; nothing harder than to reduce them to practice. That an individual will understand his own interests better than the government can, or, what is the same thing, that trade, if let alone, will find its way into the channels on the whole most advantageous to the community, few will deny. But what is true of all together is not true of any one singly; and no one nation can safely act on these principles, if others do not. In point of fact, no nation has acted on them since the formation of the present political communities of Europe. All that a new state, or a new government in an old one, can now propose to itself is, not to sacrifice its interests to a speculative abstraction, but to accommodate its institutions to the great political system of which it is a member. On these principles, and on the higher obligation of providing the means of national independence in its most extended sense, much that was bad in the economical policy of Spain at the period under review may be vindicated.

91 See examples of these in the reigns of Henry III. and John II. (Recop. de las Leyes, tom. ii. fol. 180, 181.) Such also were the numerous tariffs fixing the prices of grain, the vexatious class of sumptuary laws, those for the regulation of the various crafts, and, above all, on the exportation of the precious metals.

9 The English Statute Book alone will furnish abundant proof of

It would be unfair to direct our view to the restrictive measures of Ferdinand and Isabella without noticing also the liberal tenor of their legislation in regard to a great variety of objects. Such, for example, are the laws encouraging foreigners to settle in the country; 93 those for facilitating communication by internal improvements, roads, bridges, canals, on a scale of unprecedented magnitude;" for a similar attention to the wants of navigation, by constructing moles, quays, lighthouses along the coast, and deepening and extending the harbors, "to accommodate," as the acts set forth, "the great increase of trade;" for embellishing and adding in various ways to the accommodations of the cities; for relieving the subject from onerous tolls and oppressive monopolies ; " for establishing a uniform this, in the exclusive regulations of trade and navigation existing at the close of the fifteenth century. Mr. Sharon Turner has enumer ated many, under Henry VIII., of similar import with, and, indeed, more partial in their operation than, those of Ferdinand and Isabella. History of England, vol. iv. pp. 170 et seq.

96

93 Ordenanças reales, lib. 6, tit. 4, ley 6.

94 Archivo de Simancas; in which most of these ordinances appear to be registered.-Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 11.-See also Col. de Cédulas, tom. ii. p. 443; tom. iv. nos. 33, 38.

95" Ennoblescence los cibdades é villas en tener casas grandes é bien fechas en que fagan sus ayuntamientos é concejos," etc. (Ordenanças reales, lib. 7, tit. 1, ley 1.) Señor Clemencin has specified the nature and great variety of these improvements, as collected from the archives of the different cities of the kingdom. Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 11.-Col. de Cédulas, tom. iv. no. 9.

96 Col. de Cédulas, tom. i. nos. 71, 72.-Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 63, 91, 93.-Recop. de las Leyes, lib. 5, tit. 11, ley 12.-Among the acts for restricting monopolies may be mentioned one which prohibited the nobility and great landholders from preventing their tenants' opening inns and houses of entertainment without their especial license (Pragmáticas del Reyno, 1492, fol. 96.) The same abuse, however,