ucts of the Indies--wool, silks, wines and dried
fruits, cochineal, dye-woods, indigo and leather, and finally, indeed,
ingots of gold and silver. The trade in Spain thus in time became a mere
passive machine. Already in 1545 it had been found impossible to furnish
in less than six years the goods demanded by the merchants of Spanish
America. At the end of the seventeenth century, foreigners were
supplying five-sixths of the manufactures consumed in Spain itself, and
engrossed nine-tenths of that American trade which the Spaniards had
sought so carefully to monopolize.[5]

In the colonies the most striking feature of Spanish economic policy was
its wastefulness. After the conquest of the New World, it was to the
interest of the Spaniards to gradually wean the native Indians from
barbarism by teaching them the arts and sciences of Europe, to encourage
such industries as were favoured by the soil, and to furnish the growing
colonies with those articles which they could not produce themselves,
and of which they stood in need. Only thus could they justify their
monopoly of the markets of Spanish America. The same test, indeed, may
be applied to every other nation which adopted the exclusivist system.
Queen Isabella wished to carry out this policy, introduced into the
newly-discovered islands wheat, the olive and the vine, and acclimatized
many of the European domestic animals.[6] Her efforts, unfortunately,
were not seconded by her successors, nor by the Spaniards who went to
the Indies. In time the government itself, as well as the colonist, came
to be concerned, not so much with the agricultural products of the
Indies, but with the return of the precious metals. Natives were made to
work the mines, while many regions adapted to agriculture, Guiana,
Caracas and Buenos Ayres, were neglected, and the peopling of the
colonies by Europeans was slow. The emperor, Charles V., did little to
stem this tendency, but drifted along with the tide. Immigration was
restricted to keep the colonies free from the contamination of heresy
and of foreigners. The Spanish population was concentrated in cities,
and the country divided into great estates granted by the crown to the
families of the _conquistadores_ or to favourites at court. The immense
areas of Peru, Buenos Ayres and Mexico were submitted to the most unjust
and arbitrary regulations, with no object but to stifle growing industry
and put them in absolute dependence upon the metropo