It was, of course, the fate of colonies to be pawns in the wars between powerful European States. Spain was a principal in the great war of the Spanish Succession, which was ended in 1713 by the Peace of Utrecht. Two of the articles were of importance to the Spanish possessions. By the _Asiento de Negros_ England obtained the right to send yearly to the Spanish colonies twelve hundred negro slaves, and Buenos Aires was named as one of the establishments for that traffic, while by the _Navio de Permiso_ she was permitted to send out yearly to the South Seas a ship with 650 tons of merchandise. These concessions, of course, greatly stimulated the contraband trade, for the colonists were as eager to buy as the English merchants were to sell, nor had the Spanish officials the will or the power to prevent many interlopers following in the wake of the privileged ships. Parish[30] remarks that it was "a trade which supplied the most pressing wants of the colony, and the profits of which were shared by the native capitalists. If they (the officials) did occasionally make a show of exercising their right to visit the ships, it was an empty threat, little heeded by men who were looked upon with almost as much dread as the buccaneers who had so long been the terror of all that part of the world." Under the Bourbons and under the skilful administration of Alberoni, the fortune of Spain revived, and the colonies benefited in a corresponding degree. In 1726 the Spaniards seized and fortified Montevideo which had been founded by the Portuguese a few years previously; this was an important step, for it declared that, in spite of Nova Colonia, the territory now known as Uruguay should be Spanish. The new town rapidly became wealthy and second only to Buenos Aires. There can be little doubt that historians have considerably exaggerated the weakness and decay of Spain during the eighteenth century. Her comparative strength is proved by the fact that she maintained her trade regulations which were only contravened surreptitiously. The attempt of England to overthrow them by force shows how great was the resistive power of this unenterprising but still formidable empire. The War of Jenkins's Ear may be considered as a rehearsal of the struggle for the New World which occupied a great part of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and which is still unfinished. Therefore, although the war is in itself trivial and ineffective, its purport is not so; it was the battle of the new spirit against the old, of the trader against the official, of the active against the passive. If here and elsewhere the latter had conquered, we might have had, in place of our modern hives of industry, vast thinly populated regions dotted with little, self-sufficient villages, which possibly were destined to be overrun by a more restless and energetic yellow race.[31]