beck, Dantzig, Brehmen; the men who live on the shores of the
Mediterranean take the riches of the East and of India, and conquer
Greece and the islands, and grow rich; and on this strip of marshland
keep armies which can cope with the united forces of Europe. Such is the
sea of the middle ages. But the sea of modern times is the ocean; give
the means of navigating that, give to the barbarians who inhabit its
coasts just enough civilization to build a ship and steer it, and those
barbarians, yes, the boors of Frisia, the savages of England, and of
Normandy, and of Portugal, will become the masters of the world, and
Venetians and Genoese shall be their puppets, and the Mediterranean
their pond. Since to the commerce of the Mediterranean they will oppose
the commerce of the ocean, to the riches of Greece, of Asia Minor,
Persia, and Egypt, the riches of Mexico and Peru, of India and of China,
which will flow into the banks of London, of Lisbon, of Antwerp, and
which will create armies to sweep all Italy out of the field. The Ocean
has superseded the Mediterranean, the boundless the bounded; this is the
explanation of the fall of Venice, of her political torpor and her
consequent vices. It is a law of nature that the small and sheltered
spots shall suffice while civilization is small, but that as it grows it
will seek a wider field, and its original homes be abandoned. A small
country, a small sea, made Greece and Italy greatest in antiquity and
the middle ages; a small country, a narrow sea, make them smallest in
modern times. And when the first galley of Prince Henry, the first
pinnace of Amsterdam or London, nay, the first little Norman craft set
sail for St. Brandan's Isle, the fate of Venice was sealed; Lodovico
Manin, and Casanova, and Bonaparte, and Campo Formio, all that in
Venetian history can mean corruption and disgrace, all was irrevocably
fixed; the geographical chance which had raised the palaces of Venice
has also caused them to moulder; time which made has also unmade, for
life is movement and movement is change. That immorality is not the
cause but the effect of political decline is as little conceived by
Ruskin as that neither the one nor the other can be produced by artistic
degradation; in his system which makes artistic inferiority the visible
expression of moral corruption, and national misfortune its direct
punishment, there can be no room for any of the great laws of
development and decay which histori