t the
English might by their superiority at sea, get and maintain a firm
footing, as well on the continent as the islands of America: there the
Spainards, like the fable of the dog in the manger, neither improve it
themselves, nor will admit others to improve; I mean in all the south
continent of America, from Buenos Ayres to port St. Julien, a country
fruitful, a climate healthful, able to maintain plentifully any numbers,
even to millions of people, with an uninterrupted communication within the
land, as far as to the golden mountain of the Andes or Cordilleras, where
the Chilians, unsubdued by any European power, a docible, civilized
people, but abhorring the Spaniards, would not fail to establish a
commerce infinitely profitable, exchanging gold for all your English
manufactures, to an inexpressible advantage.

Among the islands, why should not we, as well as the French, plant upon
the fruitful countries of Cuba and Hispaniola, as rich and capable of
raising sugars, cocoa, ginger, pimento, indigo, cotton, and all the other
productions usual in that latitude, as either the Barbadoes or Jamaica.

Our factories, for they cannot yet be called colonies, on the coast of
Africa, offer us the like advantages. Why are they not turned into
populous and powerful colonies, as they might be? Why not encouraged from
hence? And why is not their trade espoused and protected as our other
colonies and factories? but left to be ravaged by the naked and
contemptible negroes; plundered, and their trade ravished by the more
unjust and more merciless interlopers, who, instead of thieves, for they
are no better, would be called separate traders only, though they break in
by violence and fraud upon the property of an established company, and rob
them of their commerce, even under the protection of their own forts and
castles, which these paid nothing towards the cost of.

Why does not England enlarge and encourage the commerce of the coast of
Guinea? plant and fortify, and establish such possessions there as other
nations, the Portuguese for example, in the opposite coast on the same
latitude? Is it not all owing to the most unaccountable indolence and
neglect? What hinders but that we might ere now have had strong towns and
an inhabited district round them, and a hundred thousand Christians
dwelling at large in that country, as the Portuguese have now at Melinda,
in the same latitude, on the eastern coast?

And what hinders, but that sa