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In a fertile soil and happy climate, the great abundance and

cheapness of land, a circumstance common to all new colonies, is,

it seems, so great an advantage, as to compensate many defects in

civil government. Frezier, who visited Peru in 1713, represents

Lima as containing between twenty-five and twenty-eight thousand

inhabitants. Ulloa, who resided in the same country between 1740

and 1746, represents it as containing more than fifty thousand.

The difference in their accounts of the populousness of several

other principal towns of Chili and Peru is nearly the same; and

as there seems to be no reason to doubt of the good information

of either, it marks an increase which is scarce inferior to that

of the English colonies. America, therefore, is a new market for

the produce of its own silver mines, of which the demand must

increase much more rapidly than that of the most thriving country

in Europe.