The home government enacted laws of incredible severity in trying to enforce this policy. In 1599 the governor of Buenos Aires was instructed to forbid all importation and exportation under penalty of death and forfeiture of property. The shipping of hides and horsehair to Spain would seem to be harmless enough, but the Spanish government dreaded that gold and silver might be smuggled out in the packages. The government would lose its royal fifth and the precious metals might be sent to Spain's rivals and enemies in Europe. According to the economic ideas then accepted, gold and silver alone constituted wealth, and every ounce mined in America which did not reach Spain's coffers was considered irretrievably lost. To prevent clandestine shipments of the precious metals all commercial intercourse from the coast to the interior was made illegal, and no goods whatever were permitted to pass along the road between Buenos Aires and Cordoba. In the very nature of things such laws were unenforcible. Even the governors sent out for the special purpose of repressing evasions recommended modifications. But the Cadiz monopolists were stubborn and their influence with the Court was all-powerful. The laws remained on the statute books only to be constantly disregarded. No human power could keep people who lived on the seashore, and who had hides, wool, and horsehair to sell, from exchanging them for clothing and tools. Perforce Buenos Aires became a community of smugglers. English and Dutch ships surreptitiously landed their cargoes of manufactures and took their pay in hides or in silver dollars that had escaped the Spanish soldiers on the road down from Potosi. Rio and Santos, in Brazil, became intermediate warehouses for the commerce of the Plate. The officials in Buenos Aires itself connived at evasions, and the very governors made great fortunes in partnership with smugglers. The guards along the interior routes shut their eyes when the mule trains passed, and the goods of Flanders and France reached Cordoba, Santiago, Potosi, and even Lima, by way of Buenos Aires, and were sold at prices with which the Cadiz monopolists could not compete. Silver came surreptitiously from Chile and Bolivia to pay for these goods. The net result was that trade followed its natural and easiest route, although there was a fearful waste of energy in the process. The bribe-taking official, the idle soldier at the road station, the smuggler handling his goods in small boats and risking his life at night, and the numerous middle men absorbed what might have been legitimate profit to the seller or to the consumer. Commerce was half strangled, and with it the industries of the Spanish colonies. Civil government itself suffered, for a community whose daily occupation it was to break one law could not be expected to have much respect for other laws, nor for the bribe-taking rulers and mulish legislators.