the public interest, with combined regard to the revenue and a guaranteed
labor supply, the primary consideration.[14] The high prices charged for
slaves, however, together with the burdensome restrictions constantly
maintained upon trade in general, steadily hampered the growth of Spanish
colonial industry. Furthermore the allurements of Mexico and Peru drained
the older colonies of virtually all their more vigorous white inhabitants,
in spite of severe penalties legally imposed upon emigration but never
effectively enforced.

[Footnote 14: Scelle, I, books 1-3.]

The agricultural régime in the islands was accordingly kept relatively
stagnant as long as Spain preserved her full West Indian domination. The
sugar industry, which by 1542 exported the staple to the amount of 110,000
arrobas of twenty-five pounds each, was standardized in plantations of two
types--the _trapiche_ whose cane was ground by ox power and whose labor
force was generally thirty or forty negroes (each reckoned as capable of
the labor of four Indians); and the _inqenio_, equipped with a water-power
mill and employing about a hundred slaves.[15] Occasional slave revolts
disturbed the Spanish islanders but never for long diminished their
eagerness for slave recruits. The slave laws were relatively mild, the
police administration extremely casual, and the plantation managements
easy-going. In short, after introducing slavery into the new world the
Spaniards maintained it in sluggish fashion, chiefly in the islands, as an
institution which peoples more vigorous industrially might borrow and adapt
to a more energetic plantation régime.

[Footnote 15: Saco, pp. 127, 128, 188; Oviedo, _Historia General de las
Indias_, book 4. chap. 8.]