is evident, in spite of the complaints which the commerce of Cadiz has so often repeated on this point--while the merchants of Manila have never consented to this company, rather, always protesting and speaking against it, and when what may be offered to them is found by experience to be prejudicial to the preservation and maintenance of those islands--that the silk goods which are made in España are of so small amount that they cannot supply America, nor can those of China injure the consumption and satisfactory disposal of the Spanish goods." [4] Manila claims that this new company will draw from the Spanish empire a much greater quantity of silver for the benefit of infidels than Manila can spend in buying the goods which have been sent thence to Acapulco; and that Cadiz has no room for complaints against the other commerce, since its own merchants are interested in this company--and all without the weighty motives which led to the concession of the Philippine commerce, the propagation of the Catholic faith, the preservation of the Spanish power in Eastern Asia, and the advancement of the Christian religion there. The establishment of this "Royal Company of Philipinas," in which traders of Cadiz have shares, shows plainly that all their complaints against the injuries to Spanish commerce from the Manila silk-trade were "merely a pretext for their securing the slender profits which that trade yielded to the islands." The trading-fleets and galleons which are sent out from Cadiz every two years are laden mainly with products made by foreign nations--English, Dutch, Genoese, Venetians, and others--and this traffic alienates from the Spanish crown each year more than eight millions of pesos; and even greater drain of money results from the traffic which those foreign nations carry on in the Indias. [5] Much more money is taken out of Nueva España by the Spanish trading-fleets, laden mainly with articles produced by foreigners and shipped thither by the merchants of Cadiz, than by the Manila galleon which carries thither goods bought from the Chinese. In the former case, the money is used to injure and harass the Spanish power; in the second, it goes to the Chinese, who are able neither to invade Spanish territory nor to aid the enemies of the crown. These foreign trading nations, moreover, carry to China and other countries of Eastern Asia more than four millions of pesos of Mexican and Peruvian coinage, which they spend there for the purchase of silks and other commodities, "in order to introduce these goods into the Indias, either illicitly or through the agency of the traders of Cadiz." In the junta convened by the viceroy of Mexico in February, 1732, one of the leading arguments for continuing the increased permission to Manila was, "that the returns of silver produced by the fabrics of foreign manufacture which the aforesaid [traders of Cadiz] send in fleets and galleons to the Indias were in tens of millions, which from