Note 17 — II

The obras pias were pious legacies which usually stipulated that two-thirds of their value should be advanced at interest for the furtherance of maritime commercial undertakings until the premiums, which for a voyage to Acapulco amounted to 50, to China 25, and to India 35 per cent., had increased the original capital to a certain amount. The interest of the whole was then to be devoted to masses for the founders, or to other pious and benevolent purposes. A third was generally kept as a reserve fund to cover possible losses. The government long since appropriated these reserve funds as compulsory loans, “but they are still considered as existing.”

When the trade with Acapulco came to an end, the principals could no longer be laid out according to the intentions of the founders, and they were lent out at interest in other ways. By a royal ordinance of November 3, 1854, a junta was appointed to administer the property of the . The total capital of the five endowments (in reality only four, for one of them no longer possessed anything) amounted to nearly a million of dollars. The profits from the loans were distributed according to the amounts of the original capital, which, however, no longer existed in cash, as the government had disposed of them.