Commerce has its two forms, the extensive and the intensive; one that considers the world at large, and one that seeks to confine itself to the interests of a nation. The latter, before the nineteenth century, was everywhere the type of colonial commerce. The nations held their colonies in leading strings; cramped and crowded them in their natural growth, and so checked their development that they lost the benefit that they might have gained from a more liberal policy. Of all the nations, Spain pursued this short-sighted policy most rigidly. Not only in commerce, but in everything else, she cramped her colonies. Foreign trade was so sternly prohibited that, in her period of supremacy, she put to death any alien merchant that ventured into one of her ports. Her colonies were her cows; no one could milk them but herself; but she milked them so dry as to starve them of their natural yield. Spain never learned the lesson that the other nations were taking to heart. In the nineteenth century her policy with her colonies was as illiberal as in the eighteenth. As a result, rebellions everywhere broke out; one by one the colonies became free, and the country whose possessions covered more than a continent at the beginning of the century, held, at the end, but a shred of her once-splendid dominion. Spain's treatment of the Philippine Islands in their commercial interests, forms a marked example of what I have previously said, and an extended account of this remarkable method of trade cannot fail to be of interest. The Philippines, at first, in 1569, were too far away to be dealt with directly, and were made an appanage of the intermediate colony of Mexico, through which they were reached and controlled. The method was curious. The natives were no sooner subdued and put under Spanish governors than they were required to pay roundly in taxes and tribute to the royal treasury. All this belonged to the crown, but some of it had to be devoted to the government of the colony; and the Spanish grandees that exiled themselves to that far land, took good care to pay themselves well for the penance. For many years the taxes were paid to the treasury wholly in colonial produce, and for many more years, partly so. This material was exchanged for Chinese wares, junks from the Celestial kingdom visiting the islands each spring, and bartering silks and diverse goods of China for the rice, hemp, and other produce of the islands, which had been collecting during the year in the royal stores at Manila. The Treasure-galleons.