Excerpt from Scenes in Europe From the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella to the pre sent time the policy of the Spanish government has been anti-commercial. Their aim has always been to exclude foreign goods so as to force the inhabitants to rely on native manufactures. But the roads in Spain are bad, and the government taxes on native industry are heavy, so that it is impossible for the Spaniards, even if they were ever so skilful and ingenious, to manufacture arti cles as cheap as the French and English, who have no such difiiculties to contend with. The result is that more than half of the entire trade of the country has been thrown into the hands of smugglers. Despite of the laws'enacted against the importation of foreign goods, they are brought into the country and the people buy them in preference to their own native manufactures, because they can obtain them cheaper. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.