e all carried to the
Grand Khan or other princes of these regions: in truth, they possess all
the great treasures of the world."

What a reversal of values for that introspective mind of Christendom,
so long occupied with its own soul! And what an opportunity,--all the
great treasures of the world possessed by people who welcome merchants
but "hate to see soldiers"; being themselves "no soldiers at all, only
accomplished traders and most skillful artisans." Here was the promised
land for Europeans, wretchedly poor, but good soldiers enough. Here was
Eldorado, symbol of all external and objective values which so fired the
imagination in that age of discovery; presenting a concrete and
visualized goal, a _summum bonum_, attainable, not by contemplation, but
by active endeavor; fascinating alike to the merchant dreaming of
profits, to the statesman intent on conquest, to the priest in search of
martyrdom, to the adventurer in, search of gold.

III

And who was not in search of gold? "Gold is excellent; gold is treasure,
and he who possesses it does all that he wishes to in this world, and
succeeds in helping souls into paradise." So thought Columbus,
expressing in a phrase the motto of many men, and conveniently revealing
to us an essential secret of European history. For gold, so abundant in
the East, was scarce in the West. The mines of Europe have never been
adequate to the needs of an expanding industrial civilization.
Importation of expensive Eastern luxuries, normally overbalancing
exports, produces a drain of specie to the Orient, that reservoir to
which the precious metals seem naturally to flow, and from which they do
not readily return; so that to maintain the gold supply and prevent a
fatal appreciation of money value has been a serious problem in both
ancient and modern times. During the Roman Republic the supply of gold
was maintained at Rome by the systematic exploitation of Syria and Asia
Minor. But after Augustus reformed the government of the provinces, the
accumulated treasure of the West began to return to the Orient: the
annual exportation of 200,000,000 sesterces in payment for the silks and
spices of India and Arabia, of Syria and Egypt, was one of the causes of
economic exhaustion and the collapse of imperial power. "So dear," says
Pliny, "do pleasures and women cost us."

During the age of feudal isolation, this ever-recurring problem did not
exist; and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries