Page:Mexico in 1827 Vol 1.djvu/101

Rh which was originally cultivated merely as an apendage to the cacao plantations, is now considered as a separate branch of agriculture, and has already been grown, and exported to some extent.

The plantations of Cūāūtlă will be excluded from the foreign market by the distance, and the difficulties of communication; but they will supply the whole consumption of the Interior, which is daily increasing.

Of the rapidity with which the cultivation of coffee may be extended, the Havanna has furnished a memorable example.

In the year 1800, the island only contained sixty plantations, in 1817 it possessed seven hundred and seventy-nine, and at the present day the number is estimated at nearly nine hundred. This extraordinary impulse was communicated by events not calculated to exercise so direct an influence upon the prosperity of the country, as those which have taken place in Mexico, where the bonds by which the internal resources of the country were so long cramped, have been burst at once. It was the ruin of St. Domingo, and the relaxation of the Colonial System in Spain, that led to the prosperity of the Havanna; nor is it assuming much, to suppose