290 JOURNAL. 



" cipher ! Then should we see the true rising-star of our prosperity. 

 " Our fertile soil abounds in productions of all sorts, and we need 

 " but little from abroad. On whichever side we look, Nature is 

 " overflowing, and only wants funds, talents, activity, industry. Yes, 

 " I repeat, — let that day arrive, our exports will augment, and im- 

 " portation will decrease ; and in a happy hour may the receipts of 

 " the treasury decrease with them," &c. &c. &c. This, for a state 

 yet in infancy, with a bare million of inhabitants, and those half 

 savages, and which produces, ready made, that metal from its hills 

 which may purchase the manufactures of the world, is perhaps as 

 exquisite a specimen of the perversion of principles, and of their 

 misapplication, as it is possible to conceive. The discourses of Men- 

 tor in Telemachus would be just as applicable. Chile for a long 

 period ought not to spare people to manufacture any thing beyond 

 necessaries ; she wants hands to till the ground, to dig the mines, 

 to man the ships, which she must have if she will have any thing. 

 Her raw production, her staple commodity, is gold, or the equally 

 valuable copper ; and it grieves one to see a parcel of rules well 

 enough for a ready-civilised country in Europe, — where the niggard 

 earth yields not wherewithal to trade, and all must be laboured and 

 fashioned, and the gold and silver must be made with men's hands, — 

 adopted here, where every circumstance is diametrically opposite. 



This is quite enough of the reglamento for me. I have no pa- 

 tience for custom-house registers, and manifests, and invoices, and un- 

 derstand them as little as I like them. Besides, I have nothing to 

 do with them, except as they are here part of an essay towards go- 

 verning a new state by no means as yet prepared for them. 



I remember the time when I should as little have thought of read- 

 ing the reglamento of Chile, as I should of poring over the report 

 of a committee of turnpike roads in a distant country ; and far less 

 should I have dreamed of occupying myself with the Constitution 

 Politica del estado de Chile. But, times and circumstances make 

 strange inroads on one's habits both of being and thinking; and I have 

 actually caught myself reading, with a considerable degree of interest, 

 the said Political Constitution. It was promulgated on the 23d of this 



