Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/267



HE Indians were not the only sufferers from the grasping policy of Spain. She proved to be in every way an unnatural mother to this the fairest of her Western possessions. Throned between the oceans, with a front on both the eastern and the western hemisphere, a storehouse of the world's richest mineral treasures and blessed with a variety of climate and productions which gave her the advantage of every zone, Mexico should have been the commercial peer of Spain. Humboldt called Mexico el puente del comercio del mundo ("the bridge of the commerce of the world"), it being on the direct highway between Europe and Asia. "At one time" says Brantz Mayer, "the East and the West poured their people through the cities of Vera Cruz and Acapulco, and some of the most distinguished merchants of Europe, Asia and Africa met every year in the capital, midway between Spain and China, to transact business and exchange opinions upon the growing facilities of an extended commerce."

The Council of the Indies decided that Mexico herself should derive no benefit from all these natural advantages: she should be simply a colony of miners at work for the mother-country, furnishing a market for her exports. The colonists were forbidden to make any article