s a considerable disadvantage, and hastens on that state of
things which is the natural forerunner of the decay of a nation. Wealth,
arising by commerce, however great its quantity, must be distributed
with some degree of equality; but the great adventurers in the gold
mines only shared with their sovereign, and the whole of their wealth
came in prodigious quantities, pouring in upon the country. {63}

---
{62} Though the Dutch were subject to Spain, yet that had not
prevented them from acting in an independent manner in their modes
of following trade and commerce.

{63} We see an example of this in our own trade to India. Captains of
ships, merchants, and all those who get money by that trade, come
home with moderate fortunes; but the governors, and civil and
military officers, who have been settled in the country, come home
with princely fortunes, and eclipse the old nobility of the country.
-=-

[end of page #64]

Both Spain and Portugal, finding that wealth came with such ease
from India and America, neglected industry. This, indeed, was a very
natural consequence; and, when the sources of their riches began to
dry up, they found, though too late, that instead of having increased in
wealth, they had only been enriching more industrious nations, and
ruining themselves. The gold that arrives from the West passes
through the hands of its masters with almost the same rapidity as if
they were only agents for the English and the Dutch; so chimerical an
idea is that of wealth existing without industry.

The Dutch were the only rivals of the Portuguese in the East Indies;
for though other nations came afterwards in for a share, yet the
transition from wealth to weakness was already made by the
Portuguese, before any of them had begun to set seriously to work, in
acquiring possessions, or in carrying on trade with that country.

Portugal thus fell, merely from the rivalship of a more industrious and
less advanced nation, after having embraced more territory than she
had power to keep. Spain fell, because she had embraced a wrong
object as a source of riches. {64}

The Hans Towns, which owed their prosperity, partly to their own
wisdom and perseverance, in the beginning, and partly to the contempt
with which sovereigns, in the days of chivalry, viewed commerce,
might, with very little penetration, and much less exertion of wisdom
than they had displayed, have seen that the spirit of commerce was
becoming general, an