CHAPTER V. COLONIAL PRODUCTS.

numerous nation, or by the prospect of selling the results of our labor to others abroad who are not so well supplied or do not produce the articles we cultivate and manufacture. But Mexico, as at present constituted, is an exceedingly small white civilized nation, if we exclude her four and a half millions of Indians. She is not increased annually by immigration from the crowded countries of the Old World, nor does she encourage the advent of strangers. Her population therefore is substantially confined within the narrow limits of natural increase by birth alone. These singular facts exhibit the anomalous condition of all the Spanish settlements upon the virgin and inviting soil of America; and until the Chinese exclusiveness of these various western nations is abandoned as an absurdity in the nineteenth century, we do not believe that the Arab plough will be replaced by the civilized implements of North American agriculture, or that the Mexican shepherd will turn into an enlightened farmer. We have seen that even the stimulus of domestic demand for cotton, has been unable to produce a new agricultural class among those who were devoted to other traditionary toils. What hope, then, can there be of an improvement in cereal cultivation, when the country is already supplied, and owns neither a navy nor merchantmen?