GRAZING AND NOT AN AGRICULTURAL COUNTRY. 75 



tended uncounted herds. The prolific soil soon yielded, with little 

 labor, the required quantity of vegetables and cereal products ; 

 domestic markets were wanted for the sale of the surplus, and the 

 Spanish government did not open its harbors for exportation. 

 Agriculture was thus early limited to the mere animal wants of the 

 glebce adscripti and emigrant Spaniards, and as the Indian never 

 labors except when compelled by force or necessity, he soon pre- 

 ferred the idle and wandering life of a herdsman to that of a farmer. 

 Many of these estates now number from ten to twenty thousand 

 head of cattle. Besides this the Spanish laws presented the In- 

 dian no prospects of independent agricultural rights. The foreign 

 landholder enjoyed the exclusive ownership of the vast freehold. 

 There was no encouragement or hope given to small farmers who 

 might emerge from the servile race, and the consequence is that 

 Mexico, until she becomes an exporting country, receives an aug- 

 mented population by immigration, and sub-divides her immense ter- 

 ritorial manors, under the demands of trade, will, in all likelihood 

 remain stationary in every thing pertaining to agriculture. It is 

 the multiplication of freeholders under the stimulus of commerce, 

 that promotes freedom, industry, and personal independence. 

 Competition is continually excited by the wants of a numerous 

 nation, or by the prospect of selling the results of our labor to 

 others abroad who are not so well supplied or do not produce the 

 articles we cultivate and manufacture. But Mexico, as at present 

 constituted, is an exceedingly small white civilized nation, if we 

 exclude her four and a half millions of Indians. She is not in- 

 creased annually by immigration from the crowded countries of the 

 Old World, nor does she encourage the advent of strangers. Her 

 population therefore is substantially confined within the narrow 

 limits of natural increase by birth alone. These singular facts ex- 

 hibit the anomalous condition of all the Spanish settlements upon 

 the virgin and inviting soil of America ; and until the Chinese ex- 

 clusiveness of these various western nations is abandoned as an 

 absurdity in the nineteenth century, we do not believe that the 

 Arab plough will be replaced by the civilized implements of North 

 American agriculture, or that the Mexican shepherd will turn into 

 an enlightened farmer. We have seen that even the stimulus of 

 domestic demand for cotton, has been unable to produce a new 

 agricultural class among those who were devoted to other tradi- 

 tionary toils. W T hat hope, then, can there be of an improvement 

 in cereal cultivation, when the country is already supplied, and 

 owns neither a navy nor merchantmen ? 



