Statistics of Trade and Commerce of New Orleans in 1853.. Produce received at New Orleans from the Interior in 1853. Exports of Cotton and Tobacco from New Orleans in 1852-53, &c.... Sugar and Molasses Exported from New Orleans for the last Year.... Shipping arrived at New Orleans for Years 1852 and 1853.. Prices of Cotton, Sugar, and Molasses at New Orleans for the last Five Years.. Pork and Corn at New Orleans last Five Years Exports of Flour, Pork, Bacon, Lard, Beef, Lead, Whisky, and Corn, in 1853.. Commercial Value of an Old Man in China.-The Love of Money.. 630 HUNT'S MERCHANTS' MAGAZINE AND COMMERCIAL REVIEW. NOVEMBER, 1853. Art. I.-COMMERCE OF THE UNITED STATES. NUMBER 11. THE COMMERCE OF ASIA BROUGHT TO AMERICA ITS CIVILIZATION-REVELATION OF AN EXTINCT TRADE COMMERCE OF PERUMEXICO: THE CAPITAL CITY TENOCHTITLAN, THE COUNTRY, MANUFACTURES, PRODUCTS, AND TRADE THE WEST INDIES-INFLUENCE OF MEXICAN COMMERCE AND CIVILIZATION IN POPULATING THE UNITED STATES-INDIAN TRADE WITHIN THE UNITED STATES-MERCANTILE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE INDIANS-AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS OF THE INDIANS, AND TRADE THEREIN THE CHASE-FISHERY-MANUFACTURES-EXTENT OF COM MUNICATION. As the Indians of all parts of America were so eminently one peoplebeing of one origin, displaying a unity so remarkable in all the elements of character, so extremely alike in their fate: and as the peculiar features developed in the United States depended so greatly on the condition of things in Mexico, the parent state, it is necessary to any intelligent exhibit of affairs in the former, to extend the scope of the present article to a connected review of the circumstances of aboriginal America generally. MANCO CAPAC, the civilizer of Peru, arrived in that region, as before noted, not far from the year 1200 of the Christian era, preceding the Columbian discovery by only three centuries; so that the period for the development of the results of his advent up to the arrival of the European influence, was of about the same length as the interval between the latter event and the opening of the present century. It was not far from the same time that the Aztec tribe, in Mexico, became civilized; but it appears from their traditions, that a civilized people called the Toltecks, had existed in Mexico for about 600 years before that period. We have said that the seeds of this first American civilization were brought over on the wings of Asiatic Commerce. The first evidence of this fact is the time at which the teachers of America reached her shores. Sufficient attention has not been directed to this point. The period of the arrival of Manco Capac and the other civilizers, inevitably connects them with Southeastern Asia-with China or India-which, as we have already noticed, were then active maritime powers-extending their Commerce and adventure over vast regions of sea. From this part of Asia we would naturally expect the civilization of America to have been drawn, and the course of our investigation in the former number has made it an evident impossibility that it should have been derived from any other portion of the continent. Finally, the nature of the civilization effected-the temples, and other architectural remains, the form of religion, &c., all tend strongly to confirm these views, fixing upon India as the source of American civilization. But let us remark, we do not here fall into the fault we have before pointed out. These imperfect resemblances, (stronger certainly than in any other parallel,) though adding probability to the collective argument, we allow for themselves alone a very secondary consideration. It matters not what was the character of the teachers of America, whether purely religious, or of any other particular cast. The region whence they came had long lost that propensity to wander which belongs to barbarians. With a civilized people, war or Commerce alone are sufficient agencies for a wide adventure. Without the transportive power of one or the other of them, all the influences developed within any nation would remain locked up within its own limits. The Commerce of this part of Asia, especially as regards the ocean and the places beyond it, was its great engine of adventure. Neither the civilization nor the religion then possessed by it, could have reached any remote point where this more active power had not preceded them and pointed out the way-nay, without its having even borne them thither. Or if one of these, or any other influence of that region, had progressed a little beyond the limit of its general Commerce, still it had followed for nearly its whole path in the wake of the latter, indeed under its very sails, and without the aid and encouragement so afforded, would have remained quietly at home. Without the maritime Commerce of Asia, its civilization and religion could never have reached America. Indeed, we shall find everywhere, upon attentive examination, that it is to Commerce mainly these great principles are indebted for their progress from nation to nation, and from clime to clime. Even war, supposed to have effected so much in this way as the great carrier of these influences, has acted mostly as a subsidiary of trade. It has merely opened the way-and through the intercourse following-the peaceful intimacy of victor and vanquished, it has ben, that all real improvement, all the achievements of the mild agencies, have been effected. It certainly is not in war, of itself, to propagate the opposite to its own nature and results; and for those opposites, there is no other so efficient medium, none other to be named in comparison with Commerce. Thus the Commerce of Asia brought to America the new ideas and new things, or a part thereof, which had been developed there since the first emigration thence to America. It brought teachers-brought an improved agriculture brought manufactures, the arts, the implements and means of a general advance. It brought a living, progressive spirit, which, if vastly inferior to the high energy breathed and exercised by the more enlightened nations of our day, was yet of a mighty activity compared to the feeble sentience of the barbarism upon which it fell. It awakened the savages of Western America, inspired them with an ambition of improvement, and led them to an elevation, which, far as it was below our present standard, was not undeserving of the respect even of these times. The establishment or extension of trade is implied in the material improvement of any people. It is just as much a necessity of such advance, as the betterment of agriculture, or the establishment of some degree of manufactures; and is a necessity because of these very things, which it must exist to give effect to. A division of labor is essential to progress in every material respect, and the division of labor must rest upon the firm basis of trade. When a man ceases to make his own clothing that he may devote his exclusive industry to the cultivation of the soil, he must buy clothes of his neighbor, who, becoming an exclusive weaver or tailor, in order to supply the double demand upon his labor, must obtain his bread of the cultivator. The higher the civilization attained, the more minute must be this labor-division, and the more extended this division, the broader and more varied must be this foundation of Commerce upon which it is supported. There was then a very great trade existing within the civilized parts of America, and to measure proximately the extent of it, we need but take a brief survey of the results achieved by that civilization. Here we have a standard which, though not giving us the exact proportion of all the differlent interests of these regions, is, as regards a very fair estimate of their re lations, infallible. Though not a word is told us in regard to a nation'strade; though we hear not of a ship or a carriage, of a merchant or a market, yet is their visible impression left in the other objects whose developments, and, in a degree, whose birth, depended upon these. Through the correlation of interests, the seen reveal the existence of the unseen; and the known arts, manufactures, agriculture, &c., of any defunct nation, as efficiently disclose the state and magnitude of its Commerce, as the perturbations of the observed planets make known to the attentive astronomer the existence, the place, the bulk of an undiscovered member of the system. It has been stated by historians, and the story is gravely repeated by geographers and encyclopedists, that among the ancient Peruvians trade and Commerce were scarcely known, although, as in savage communities, some barter existed. But an error very decided, and nothing more credible for its frequent repetition, is conveyed in this assertion. The great bulk of all Commerce is, indeed, simply barter, and the whole object of money is, without reference to its own commercial value, to facilitate the exchange of commodities; but when mere barter is talked of, the idea intended and actually received, is of a very insignificant business in the way of exchange, each person being supposed to supply the chief part of his own wants, which must, of course, be very few, and very rudely supplied. But a state like this is totally inconsistent with what the same writers tell us again of Peru. The Peruvians were the most civilized of all the aboriginal population of America-were better skilled than any in agriculture, in architecture, sculpture, the use and working of the metals, and in the mechanic arts generally. They had much the largest buildings, although not built so high as in Mexico and Central America. A single building, comprising the great temple of the sun, the palace and the fortress of the Inca, was about a mile and a half in circuit. They had very high and massive obelisks, mausoleums, &c., constructed of stone, with mason work; they had aqueducts, viaducts, &c., and most excellent roads of vast length. The roads made in Peru afterwards by the Spaniards, with all their wealth and power, could not offer the slightest pretension, in fact, scarcely deserved the name of highways when compared with these works of the aboriginals. One of these avenues, the chief one, extended from Quito, at the equator, to Cuzco, the capital of the country, being 1,500 miles in length, or about as long as a road extending in as straight a line as possible along the whole line of coast of the United States, or a road from New York city directly across to New Mexico; and all of this great length, too, lay along the Andes chain, through one of the most difficult regions of the earth. Where did they get the skill to construct all these great works? Only through an extended division of labor, and the encouragement everywhere essential to such extended division and to the attainment of such skill in the different branches-a high compensation, which compensation implies the existence in abundance of articles of a great exchangable value-in other words, of accumulated property, and even necessitates the use of money itself. Such works never were effected, nor the skill to make them attained, among a people not advanced beyond the state of mere barter. What induced a part of those people to devote themselves to the manufacture of their beautiful cotton and other fabrics, which it was certainly far from the ability of all to make, even if there were not any great manufactories, but the fact that they could be sold profitably to those who could not make them for themselves? And where was profit to be found, if the spirit of trade had not combined and multiplied to an infinity (in the action and reaction of trade and labor-progress) articles to which it had affixed an exchangeable worth utterly beyond any original intrinsic value of their own? They had vast accumulations of gold --but what made them value the gold above the stones? Alone, all this metal was insufficient to rear a single temple or build a mile of road. It was its exchangeable value only, (in which all values are included,) it was only for what it would purchase of other material, that gold was regarded as worth anything. Without trade, gold is valueless, and the inconceivable heaps of treasure gathered up in Peru afford the strongest evidence of an enlarged and all pervading trade. But without Commerce, what should concentrate so large a population as that of Peru, living as they did, mostly in peace? What could keep them together, what could assemble them in great towns, but the pursuits, the hopes, the excitements, the results of trade? What built up and sustained the great capital city, Cuzco? Every one understands that in all compact cities, the great bulk of the population must be composed of merchants, mechanics, and other laboring men, who are to be fed by another great but scattered body of rural laborers located without, and between whom and the city a perpetual trade, the source of great mutual profit, is thus kept up. What could have been the use of the long and expensive road mentioned, but to promote intercourse between even the extremes of the country? Finally, how could a centralism sufficiently strong to hold together under a single government that vast region, extending over more than twenty degrees of latitude-with a coast even longer than the Atlantic coast of the United States, and which the Spaniards found it convenient or necessary to divide into three provinces, forming now three independent nations, each of them larger than old Spain, and unitedly larger than any European nation of the present, but Russia-how, under so mild a government, could a centralism sufficiently strong for such a purpose have been created or maintained in the absence of a general and familiar intercourse? How, but by trade, were the people to be made acquainted with each other? How were they to be inspired with a common interest in the country, and to feel a general inclination toward the general center? Perhaps the war between the rival Incas, Atahualpa, and Huasco, disturb |