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The Count de Fuen-Clara assumed the viceroyal baton on the 3d of November, 1742. His term of four years was passed without any events of remarkable importance for New Spain save the capture, by Anson, of one of the East Indian galleons with a freight of one million three hundred and thirteen thousand dollars in coined silver, and four thousand four hundred and seventy marks of the same precious metal, besides a quantity of the most valuable products of Mexico. This period of the viceroyalty must necessarily be uninteresting and eventless. The wars of the old world were confined to the continent and to the sea. Mexico, locked up amid her mountains, was not easily assailed by enemies who could spare no large armies from the contests at home for enterprises in so distant a country. Besides, it was easier to grasp the harvest on the ocean that had been gathered on the land. England contented herself, therefore, with harassing and pilfering the commerce of Castile, while Mexico devoted all her energies to the development of her internal resources of mineral and agricultural wealth. Emigrants poured into the country. The waste lands were filling up. North, south, east and west, the country was occupied by industrious settlers and zealous curates, who were engaged, in the cultivation of the soil and the spiritual subjection of the Indians. The spirit as well as the dangers of the conquest were past, and Mexico, assumed, in the history of the age, the position of a quiet, growing nation, equally distant from the romantic or adventurous era of early settlement when danger and difficulty surrounded the Spaniards, and from the lethean stagnation into which she fell in future years under Spanish misrule.

The Conde de Revilla-Gigedo, the first of that name who was viceroy of Mexico, reached the capital on the 9th of July, 1746, and on the 12th of the same month, his master, Philip V. died, leaving Ferdinand VI. as his successor. Under the reign of this