ld and silver to be coined in all the mints, and
curiously wrought in all the jewellers' shops, of Europe and Asia.
Thence came the finest tobacco, the finest chocolate, the finest indigo,
the finest cochineal, the hides of innumerable wild oxen, quinquina,
coffee, sugar. Either the viceroyalty of Mexico or the viceroyalty of
Peru would, as an independent state with ports open to all the world,
have been an important member of the great community of nations.

And yet the aggregate, made up of so many parts, each of which
separately might have been powerful and highly considered, was impotent
to a degree which moved at once pity and laughter. Already one most
remarkable experiment had been tried on this strange empire. A small
fragment, hardly a three hundredth part of the whole in extent, hardly
a thirtieth part of the whole in population, had been detached from the
rest, had from that moment begun to display a new energy and to enjoy
a new prosperity, and was now, after the lapse of a hundred and twenty
years, far more feared and reverenced than the huge mass of which it had
once been an obscure corner. What a contrast between the Holland which
Alva had oppressed and plundered, and the Holland from which William
had sailed to deliver England! And who, with such an example before him,
would venture to foretell what changes might be at hand, if the most
languid and torpid of monarchies should be dissolved, and if every one
of the members which had composed it should enter on an independent
existence?

To such a dissolution that monarchy was peculiarly liable. The King, and
the King alone, held it together. The populations which acknowledged him
as their chief either knew nothing of each other, or regarded each other
with positive aversion. The Biscayan was in no sense the countryman of
the Valencian, nor the Lombard of the Biscayan, nor the Fleeting of
the Lombard, nor the Sicilian of the Fleeting. The Arragonese had never
ceased to pine for their lost independence. Within the memory of many
persons still living the Catalans had risen in rebellion, had entreated
Lewis the Thirteenth of France to become their ruler with the old title
of Count of Barcelona, and had actually sworn fealty to him. Before the
Catalans had been quieted, the Neapolitans had taken arms, had abjured
their foreign master, had proclaimed their city a republic, and had
elected a Loge. In the New World the small caste of born Spaniards which
had the