s transported in famines, when beyond price
to those who were in want, and under this extreme pressure could only be
drawn from within a narrow sphere, and in quantity sufficient to the
sustenance of but a small number of people. The routes of ancient
commerce were thus interrupted and cut asunder by barriers of transport,
and the farther they were extended became the more impassable to any
considerable quantity or weight of commodities. As long as navigation
was confined to rivers and the shores of inland gulfs and seas, the
oceans were a _terra incognita_, contributing nothing to the facility or
security of transport from one part of the world to another, and leaving
even one populous part of Asia as unapproachable from another as if they
had been in different hemispheres. The various routes of trade from
Europe and north-western Asia to India, which have been often referred
to, are to be regarded more as speculations of future development than
as realities of ancient history. It is not improbable that the ancient
traffic of the Red Sea may have been extended along the shores of the
Arabian Sea to some parts of Hindustan, but that vessels braved the
Indian Ocean and passed round Cape Comorin into the Bay of Bengal, 2000
or even 1000 years before mariners had learned to double the Cape of
Good Hope, is scarcely to be believed. The route by the Euxine and the
Caspian Sea has probably never in any age reached India. That by the
Euphrates and the Persian Gulf is shorter, and was besides the more
likely from passing through tracts of country which in the most remote
times were seats of great population. There may have been many merchants
who traded on all these various routes, but that commodities were passed
in bulk over great distances is inconceivable. It may be doubted whether
in the ante-Christian ages there was any heavy transport over even 500
m., save for warlike or other purposes, which engaged the public
resources of imperial states, and in which the idea of commerce, as now
understood, is in a great measure lost.

The advantage which absolute power gave to ancient nations in their
warlike enterprises, and in the execution of public works of more or
less utility, or of mere ostentation and monumental magnificence, was
dearly purchased by the sacrifice of individual freedom, the right to
labour, produce and exchange under the steady operation of natural
economic principles, which more than any other cause vitalizes