er very great penalties." As a
necessary corollary to this madhouse legislation an edict was issued,
prohibiting the export of gold and silver from France, on pain, not only
of confiscation of those precious metals, but of the whole fortune of
such as engaged in or winked at the traffic. The king took a public oath
never to exempt the culprits from the punishment thus imposed, and, as
the thrifty Sully had obtained from the great king a private grant of all
those confiscations, and as he judiciously promised twenty-five per cent.
thereof to the informer, no doubt he filled his own purse while
impoverishing the exchequer.

The United States, not enjoying the blessings, of a paternal government,
against which they had been fighting almost half a century, could not be
expected to rival the stupendous folly of such political economy,
although certainly not emancipated from all the delusions of the age.

Nor are we to forget how very recently, and even dimly, the idea of
freedom in commerce has dawned upon nations, the freest of all in polity
and religion. Certainly the vices and shortcomings of the commercial
system now inaugurated by the republic may be justly charged in great
part to the epoch, while her vast share in the expanding and upward
movement which civilization, under the auspices of self-government;
self-help, political freedom, free thought, and unshackled science, was
then to undertake--never more perhaps to be permanently checked--must be
justly ascribed to herself.

It was considered accordingly that the existence of so many private
companies and copartnerships trading to the East was injurious to the
interests of commerce. Merchants arriving at the different Indian ports
would often find that their own countrymen had been too quick for them,
and that other fleets had got the wind out of their sails, that the
eastern markets had been stripped, and that prices had gone up to a
ruinous height, while on the other hand, in the Dutch cities, nutmegs and
cinnamon, brocades and indigo, were as plentiful as red herrings. It was
hardly to be expected at that day to find this very triumph of successful
traffic considered otherwise than as a grave misfortune, demanding
interference on the part of the only free Government then existing in the
world. That already free competition and individual enterprise, had made
such progress in enriching the Hollanders and the Javanese respectively
with a superfluity of useful or a