"[29]
Thus the policy which ought to have favored the island first settled
by Spaniards, against the attractions of Peru, Mexico, and Cuba,
towards which the mother-colony was rapidly emptying her streams of
life, was not forthcoming. These Spaniards, who were enslaved by the
tenacious fancy that El Dorado still glittered for them in some
distant place, needed to be attached to the soil by generous
advantages, such as premiums for introducing and sustaining the
cultivation of new productions, immunity from imposts either by
Government or by the middle-men of a company, and liberty to exchange
hides, tallow, and crops of every kind with the French, Dutch, and
English, in every port of the island, to convert a precarious illicit
trade with those nations into a natural intercourse, so that different
articles of food, which were often scarce, and sometimes failed
entirely, might be regularly supplied, until by such fostering care
the colony should grow strong enough to protect itself against its own
and foreign adventurers. But if all these measures had been accordant
with the ideas of that age, they would have been defeated by its
passions.
Other people now appear upon the scene, to put the finishing touch to
this decay, while they freshen the old crimes and assume the tradition
of excess and horror which is the island's history.
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