FOOTNOTES:
[78] The official valuation of the average imports from 1792 to 1796, inclusive, was only 2,606,754 dollars; though at that period every article sent from Spain was charged at the most exorbitant price to the colonists.
[79] In 1835 nearly a million and a half lbs. were also sent to the United States, and the demand for it was likely to increase with its production.
[80] The drought in question was one of the most destructive on record; large lakes in the south, never before known to have been without water, were entirely dried up, in which immense numbers of fish perished, the stench from which was described as enough to have produced a pestilence. Another serious consequence from it, of a different description, was the prodigious increase of all kinds of vermin, especially field-mice, myriads of which overran the country, and entirely destroyed the maize-harvest for 1833.
CHAPTER XVI.
PUBLIC DEBT.
Origin of the Funded Debt of Buenos Ayres. Receipts and Expenditure from 1822 to 1825, during peace. Loan raised in England. War with Brazil, and stoppage of all revenue from the Customhouse for three years. Pecuniary difficulties in consequence. The Provincial Bank of Buenos Ayres converted into a National one. The Government interferes with it, and, by forcing it to increase its issues, destroys its credit. Debt at the close of the war at the end of 1828. Hopes founded on the peace destroyed by the mutiny of the Army;—deplorable consequences of that event. Depreciation of the Currency. Deficit in the revenue, and increase of the Funded Debt:—its amount in 1834, and further increase in 1837. General account of the liabilities of the Government up to that year; increased by subsequent war with Bolivia, and French Blockade.
In any attempt to convey an idea of the finance accounts of Buenos Ayres it should, in the first instance, be observed that, although those accounts are, primá facie, national, they exhibit in reality the receipts and expenditure of the government of the province of Buenos Ayres alone:—the other provinces, containing three-fourths of the population of the whole republic, contribute nothing towards the general expenses, though most of them manage to support their petty provincial administrations. Buenos Ayres alone found all the pecuniary means both for the war with Spain for the establishment of the independence of the republic, and, subsequently, for liberating the Banda Oriental from the domination of the Emperor of Brazil, which latter state, though gaining everything by the result, has never repaid her a single dollar. Chile owes her as much for the armies sent across the Andes, which freed that country also from the yoke of the King of Spain, and has been equally ungrateful.
It is only astonishing how this little State contrived, as she did, to raise the ways and means for these efforts, and that she did not altogether succumb to the difficulties and embarrassments they gave rise to:—that they have left her finances in a wretched state can hardly be wondered at. Nevertheless, if it had not been for the struggle with Brazil, which succeeded the establishment of her own independence of the mother-country, Buenos Ayres would long ago have been quit with all her creditors, presenting a very different appearance, quoad her finances, to the world.