the
individual and social energies, and multiplies the commercial resource
of communities. Commerce in all periods and countries has obtained a
certain freedom and hospitality from the fact that the foreign merchant
has something desirable to offer; but the action of trading is
reciprocal, and requires multitudes of producers and merchants, as free
agents, on both sides, searching out by patient experiment wants more
advantageously supplied by exchange than by direct production, before it
can attain either permanence or magnitude, or can become a vital element
of national life. The ancient polities offered much resistance to this
development, and in their absolute power over the liberty, industry and
property of the masses of their subjects raised barriers to the
extension of commerce scarcely less formidable than the want of means of
communication itself. The conditions of security under which foreign
trade can alone flourish equally exceeded the resources of ancient
civilization. Such roads as exist must be protected from robbers, the
rivers and seas from pirates; goods must have safe passage and safe
storage, must be held in a manner sacred in the territories through
which they pass, be insured against accidents, be respected even in the
madness of hostilities; the laws of nations must give a guarantee on
which traders can proceed in their operations with reasonable
confidence; and the governments, while protecting the commerce of their
subjects with foreigners as if it were their own enterprise, must in
their fiscal policy, and in all their acts, be endued with the highest
spirit of commercial honour. Every great breach of this security stops
the continuous circulation, which is the life of traffic and of the
industries to which it ministers. But in the ancient records we see
commerce exposed to great risks, subject to constant pillage, hunted
down in peace and utterly extinguished in war. Hence it became necessary
that foreign trade should itself be an armed force in the world; and
though the states of purely commercial origin soon fell into the same
arts and wiles as the powers to which they were opposed, yet their
history exhibits clearly enough the necessity out of which they arose.
Once organized, it was inevitable that they should meet intrigue with
intrigue, and force with force. The political empires, while but
imperfectly developing industry and traffic within their own
territories, had little sympathy with