Until the Peninsula was overrun by the French, Buenos Ayres, La Guayra, Porto Cavello, Maracaibo, Santa Martha, and that stronghold of the west, the key of the Isthmus of Darien, Cartagena de las Indias, with Porto Bello, and Vera Cruz, on the Atlantic shores of South America, were all prosperous and happy--“Llenas de plata;” and on the Western coast, Valparaiso, Lima, Panama, and San Bias, were thriving and increasing in population and wealth. England, through her colonies, was at that time driving a lucrative trade with all of them; but the demon of change was abroad, blown thither by the pestilent breath of European liberalism. What a vineyard for Abbe Sieyes to have laboured in! Every Capitania would have become a purchaser of one of his cut and dried constitutions. Indeed he could not have turned them out of hand fast enough. The enlightened few, in these countries, were as a drop in the bucket to the unenlightened many; and although no doubt there were numbers of the former who were well-meaning men, yet they were one and all guilty of that prime political blunder, in common with our Whig friends at home, of expecting a set of semi-barbarians to see the beauty of, and to conform to, their newfangled codes of free institutions, for which they were as ready as I am to die at this present moment. Bolivar, in his early fever of patriotism, made the same mistake, although his shrewd mind, in his later career, saw that a despotism, pure or impure--I will not qualify it--was your only government for the savages he had at one time dignified with the name of fellow-patriots. But he came to this wholesome conclusion too late; he tried backs it is true, but it would not do; the fiend had been unchained, and at length hunted him broken hearted into his grave. But the men of mind tell us, that those countries are now going through the political fermentation, which by and by will clear, when the sediment will be deposited, and the different ranks will each take their acknowledged and undisputed stations in society; and the United States are once and again quoted against we of the adverse faction, as If there were the most remote analogy between their population, originally composed of all the cleverest scoundrels of Europe, and the barbarians of Spanish America, where a few master spirits, all old Spaniards, did indeed for a season stick fiery off from the dark mass of savages amongst whom their lot was cast, like stars in a moonless night, but only to suffer a speedy eclipse from the clouds and storm which they themselves had set in motion. We shall see. The scum as yet is uppermost, and does not seem likely to subside, but it may boil over. In Cuba, however, all was at the time quiet, and still is, I believe, prosperous, and that too without having come through this said blessed political fermentation.