organism destined to liquidate the debts contracted by the nation during the war and whose capital was represented by its shares, having the High Treasurer at its head and numbers of political men among its directors, its management raised the most violent criticism in the press of the United Kingdom. It was able at first to obtain from the Government the relinquishment of the privileges that it had reserved to itself in the treaty, it claimed even, without succeeding in it, that the king of Spain should also cede to it the quarter interest which he had in the enterprise and put in tutelage William Eon, the first director whom His Catholic Majesty sent to London to represent his interests.

But soon the affairs of the company were in jeopardy. In 1720, a great crash, due in part to embezzlements and especially to the political hatred of the Whigs, who returned to power at that time, caused the failure of its financial designs. The commercial development of the Assiento was apparently no more successful. The directors cared little for the slave traffic whose profits, however considerable, appeared a small matter in comparison with the incredible profits from the contraband trade. They devoted themselves almost exclusively to the commerce of merchandise, to the great detriment of the shareholders, whose dividends were always insignificant.

They could not, in fact, carry on the account the proceeds of the contraband trade, and the whole result of this vast enterprise was changed into private profits; but, in fact, these were distributed throughout the whole English nation: London commerce shared in the whole of it in such a manner that in spite of libels and pamphlets the company resisted and maintained itself. It was forced, however, to struggle against its own countrymen; the English colony of Cadiz saw its total of affairs diminishing, and the inhabitants of Jamaica, whose fortune had been formerly in the smuggling trade, saw themselves in part dispossessed of it. They soon perceived at Madrid that the English Assiento would be the ruin of the commerce of Seville. Galleons and fleets no longer found an outlet for their merchandise, and the economic decadence of the Peninsula was accentuated with frightful rapidity. Moreover, they promptly enough forgot that the Assiento had been the ransom of

the monarchy and only thought of reducing the advantages granted. During the whole of the first half of the eighteenth century Spanish diplomacy struggled in this sense, suspending the Assiento to bring the English to terms when complications of European policy made the latter fear a diplomatic rupture, and not hesitating to have recourse to force to rid themselves of a ruinous economic yoke. The war of 1739 between Spain and England was brought about by Spanish pretensions to exclude English merchant vessels from its territorial. waters and the seizure in the port of Havana of the annual vessel of license, the Prince Frederick. There is not a diplomatic negotiation in the course of these forty years (1710-1750) in which difficulties between the Spanish Government and the South Sea Company are not taken up and discussed interminably. Thus it happened at the Congress of Soissons where the Spanish plenipotentiaries acquired convincing proofs of the smuggling trade of the directors, and, at the time of the treaty of Seville, when the commissioners, appointed on both sides, devoted long sittings to the examination of the counterclaims of the company and of the Council of the Indies.

Although upheld in this incessant struggle by France and other maritime powers who suffered from English absorption of the trade with America, Spain had to deal with too strong an adversary and could not extricate herself from the shackles which she had accepted. Geraldino, the successor of William Eon at London in the office of director of the company for the interests of His Catholic Majesty, displayed an activity and capacity which later procured for him the post of ambassador. He succeeded in considerably cramping the contraband trade of the directors and even obtained some embryonic accounts. Comptrollers sent to America denounced alike the frauds of the Assientists and of their agents; but it was too late. The agencies had become genuine storehouses of merchandise, at the same time they were bureaus of information for the city traders and counting houses for the London bankers. The entire trade of America lay in the hands of the English nation; there was no agglomeration of the new continent whose productions, needs, and

means of satisfying them, it did not know better than the corporation of the merchants of Seville had ever known them.

At the time of the treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 and of Madrid in 1750, England gave up the possession of the Assiento which she had enjoyed for more than forty years; for, in spite of interruptions and suspensions, she had never ceased her contraband trade, even during the war. This relinquishment was esteemed as a diplomatic victory by the Spaniards, although they had consented to pay the English company an indemnity of one hundred thousand crowns. It was much for them indeed to regain their commercial liberty, but one may be permitted to doubt whether the English would have consented in reality to a very great sacrifice. They had diverted to their advantage the trade of the two Americas, and nothing is more difficult than to change an established commercial current. They remained the usual furnishers of manual labor and manufactured products in the Spanish colonies.

Morcover at this time they had scarcely any more need of the Assiento, for another reason. The colonies of North America began to play, and more easily, the part of Jamaica. They had a merchant marine and land communications with the Spanish domains. Lastly, commercial liberty was gradually being established. The Assiento became, therefore, even for England, a useless point of friction, in its relations with Spain, and certain signs tend to prove that she gained rather than that she lost by relinquishing it.

The Spanish administration, taught by the difficulties of an international character which it had encountered for nearly a century, came back, after Aix-la-Chapelle, to the decision already taken in 1701, viz., to restore the slave-trade to the sphere of internal law from which it should never have issued. It was resolved to confide the enterprise only to Spaniards and, to avoid the disappointments formerly experienced in contracting with too audacious Assientists, the exploitation was divided among several partial Assientos, each one assigned to a particular region of its domains. It is proper to add that foreigners, English especially, French sometimes, often

became, under Spanish names, the furnishers of the American colonists.18

Moreover, the question lost much of its ancient interest with the progressive adoption by the government of Madrid of a more liberal colonial policy. Insensibly, after the accession of Charles III, the ports of the peninsula were open to American commerce; the auxiliaries of foreigners, without, however, proclaiming commercial liberty between Europe and America, ceased to be so systematically refused. The Assientos, deprived of their international character, lost their political aspect and no longer raised any but economic questions relative to the distribution of manual labor, to the development of the poorest countries, and were finally lost in the general liberty of commerce and of the slave-trade when physiocratic ideas had gained the minds of the rulers in the Iberian peninsula. It was already only a memory when humanitarian ideas, which were to lead to the abolition of the slave-trade and the condemnation of slavery, triumphed.

Since that time, the slave-trade has been prohibited by the voice of civilized nations and slave-traders classed with freebooters and pirates. Colonizing peoples have resumed, more or less humanely, the exploitation of black labor in the improvement of their domains. Diplomatic history has related the disputes to which the counterclaims of France and England have given place in affairs of searching vessels, suspected of being engaged in the slave-trade, and international law pays scarcely any attention to it except to ascertain the bearing and the results of the Brussels Conference. It is somewhat curious, however, that the institution does not appear to have deserved the attention of historians until after it had received its death blow, and that one should be so little interested in the means by which a whole race of men (twenty millions of individuals at the lowest estimate) should be enslaved and decimated in the course of three centuries of official and administrative slave-trade.

In terminating this study, which touches throughout the diplomatic history of Europe, the relations of which are so closely con

18 Consult for the history of the last Assientos, the work of A. Saco, Historica de la raza Africana en el nuevo Mundo, and Vol. III of the author's work.

nected with the economic history of the New World, there seems to us nothing better than to recall with bold strokes the scope of that administrative and international institution which has ceased to exist and which was the Assiento of slaves.

This institution, sprung from a favor of Charles Fifth to one of his courtiers, has successively become an element of the financial administrative organization of the Spanish monarchy, then, a factor in international negotiations, lastly, an essential element of the diplomatic life of the maritime powers of the eighteenth century. It takes up more particularly public international law and general colonial history. Its study alone clearly demonstrates the arbitrariness and absurdity of the celebrated doctrine of colonial compact and reciprocal exclusivism. Thanks to England, which alone was able fully to realize what Holland, Portugal, and France had tried before, the narrow and selfish legal regulation which bound the Castilian Indies to the mother-country became only a fiction. Much more even than that of the liberal economists, it is the proof furnished by smuggling vessels which decided the conversion of the Spaniards to ideas of commercial liberty.

And yet, by a curious contrast, the Assiento, which, on one hand, undermined and destroyed insensibly all the efficacy of the SpanishAmerican colonial compact, appears indeed, on the other hand, to have determined the possibility of its maintenance. The duration of this political and economic delusion seems in fact improbable. If it is possible to conceive of the establishment of reciprocal exclusivism, when it is a question of a few islands, as the French Antilles, subject to the rule of a strong, productive and rich mothercountry, and if it is necessary, even under these conditions, to state undeniably its disadvantages and to note the inevitable derogations and the continual defeats which were inflicted on it, one asks with astonishment how nearly the whole of two continents has been able to endure the commercial and economic burden imposed upon them by Spain. More and more feeble, poorly armed, engaged beyond her strength in continual European enterprises, this monarchy would have been in no condition, and realized it very well, to repress a general rebellion nor perhaps a local revolt. On the other hand, it