small, and
indeed not worth naming; on the contrary, now the number of European
inhabitants in the several factories of the English, Dutch, and
Portuguese, is so much increased, and the people who are subject to them
also, and who they bring in daily to clothe after the European fashion,
especially at Batavia, at Fort St. George, at Surat, Goa, and other
principal factories, that the demand for our manufactures is grown very
considerable, and daily increasing. This also the said Plan of the
Commerce insists much on, and explains in a more particular manner.

But to proceed: not only our English colonies and factories are increased,
as also the Portuguese in the Brazils, and in the south part of Africa;
not only the factories of the English and Dutch in the East Indies are
increased, and the number of Europeans there being increased call for a
greater quantity of European goods than ever; but even the Spaniards, and
their colonies in the West Indies, I mean in New Spain, and other
dominions of the Spaniards in America, are increased in people, and that
not so much the Spaniards themselves, though they too are more numerous
than ever, but the civilized free Indians, as they are called, are
exceedingly multiplied.

These are Indians in blood, but being native subjects of Spain, know no
other nation, nor do they speak any other language than Spanish, being
born and educated among them. They are tradesmen, handicrafts, and bred to
all kinds of business, and even merchants too, as the Spaniards are, and
some of them exceeding rich; of these they tell us there are thirty
thousand families in the city of Lima only, and doubtless the numbers of
these increase daily.

As all these go clothed like Spaniards, as well themselves as their wives,
children, and servants, of which they have likewise a great many, so it
necessarily follows that they greatly increase the consumption of European
goods, and that the demand of English manufactures in particular increases
in proportion, these manufactures being more than two-thirds of the
ordinary habit or dress of those people, as it is also of the furniture of
their houses; all which they take from their first patrons, the Spaniards.

It will seem a very natural inquiry here, how I can pretend to charge the
English nation with indolence or negligence in their labouring or working
their woollen manufactures; when it is apparent they work up all the wool
which their whole nation produces,