(S. N.)
COMET-SEEKER,a small telescope (q.v.) adapted especially to searching for comets: commonly of short focal length and large aperture, in order to secure the greatest brilliancy of light.
COMILLA,orKumilla, a town of British India, headquarters of Tippera district in Eastern Bengal and Assam, situated on the river Gumti, with a station on the Assam-Bengal railway, 96 m. from the coast terminus at Chittagong. Pop. (1901) 19,169. The town has many large tanks and an English church, built in 1875.
COMINES,orCommines(Flem.Komen), a town of western Flanders, 13 m. N.N.W. of Lille by rail. It is divided by the river Lys, leaving one part on French (department of Nord), the other on Belgian territory (province of West Flanders). Pop. of the French town 6359 (1906); of the Belgian town, 6453 (1904). The former has a belfry of the 14th century, restored in the 17th and 19th centuries, and remains of a chateau. Comines carries on the spinning of flax, wool and cotton.
COMITIA,the name applied, always in technical and generally in popular phraseology, to the most formal types of gathering of the sovereign people in ancient Rome. It is the plural ofcomitium, the old “meeting-place” (Lat.cum, together,ire, to go) on the north-west of the Forum. The Romans had three words for describing gatherings of the people. These wereconcilium,comitiaandcontio. Of these concilium had the most general significance. It could be applied to any kind of meeting and is often used to describe assemblies in foreign states. It was, therefore, a word that might be employed to denote an organized gathering of a portion of the Roman people such as the plebs, and in this sense is contrasted withcomitia, which when used strictly should signify an assembly of the whole people. Thus the Roman draughtsman who wishes to express the idea “magistrates of any kind as president of assemblies” writes “Magistratus queiquomque comitia conciliumve habebit” (Lex Latina tabulae Bantinae, l. 5), and formalism required that a magistrate who summoned only a portion of the people to meet him should, in his summons, use the wordconcilium. This view is expressed by Laelius Felix, a lawyer probably of the age of Hadrian, when he writes “Is qui non universum populum, sed partem aliquam adesse jubet, non comitia, sed concilium edicere debet” (Gellius,Noctes Atticae, xv. 27). But popular phraseology did not conform to this canon, andcomitia, which gained in current Latin the sense of “elections” was sometimes used of the assemblies of the plebs (see the instances in Botsford, distinction betweenComitiaandConcilium, p. 23). The distinction betweencomitiaandcontiowas more clearly marked. Both were formal assemblies convened by a magistrate; but while, in the case of thecomitia, the magistrate’s purpose was to ask a question of the people and to elicit their binding response, his object in summoning acontiowas merely to bring the people together eitherfor their instruction or for a declaration of his will as expressed in an edict (“contionem habere est verba facere ad populum sine ulla rogatione,” Gell. op. cit. xiii. 6). The word comitia merely means “meetings.”
The earliestcomitiawas one organized on the basis of parishes (curiae) and known in later times as thecomitia curiata. Thecuriavoted as a single unit and thus furnished the type for that system of group-voting which runs through all the later organization of the popular assemblies. Thiscomitiamust originally have been composed exclusively of patricians (q.v.); but there is reason to believe that, at an early period of the Republic, it had, in imitation of the centuriate organization, come to include plebeians (seeCuria). The organization which gave rise to thecomitia centuriatawas the result of the earliest steps in the political emancipation of the plebs. Three stages in this process may be conjectured. In the first place the plebeians gained full rights of ownership and transfer, and could thus become freeholders of the land which they occupied and of the appurtenances of this land (res mancipi). This legal capacity rendered them liable to military service as heavy-armed fighting men, and as such they were enrolled in the military units calledcenturiae. When the enrolment was completed the whole host (exercitus) was the best organized and most representative gathering that Rome could show. It therefore either usurped, or became gradually invested with voting powers, and gained a range of power which for two centuries (508-287B.C.) made it the dominant assembly in the state. But its aristocratic organization, based as this was on property qualifications which gave the greatest voting power to the richest men, prevented it from being a fitting channel for the expression of plebeian claims. Hence the plebs adopted a new political organization of their own. The tribunate called into existence a purely plebeian assembly, firstly, for the election of plebeian magistrates; secondly, for jurisdiction in cases where these magistrates had been injured; thirdly, for presenting petitions on behalf of the plebs through the consuls to thecomitia centuriata. This right of petitioning developed into a power of legislation. The stages of the process (marked by the Valerio-Horatian laws of 449B.C., the Publilian law of 339B.C., and the Hortensian law of 287B.C.) are unknown; but it is probable that the two first of the laws progressively weakened the discretionary power of senate and consuls in admitting such petitions; and that the Hortensian law fully recognized the right of resolutions of the plebs (plebiscita) to bind the whole community. The plebeian assembly, which had perhaps originally met bycuriae, was organized on the basis of the territorial tribes in 471B.C.This change suggested a renewed organization of the whole people for comitial purposes. Thecomitia tributa populiwas the result. This assembly seems to have been already in existence at the epoch of the Twelve Tables in 451B.C., its electoral activity is perhaps attested in 447B.C., and it appears as a legislative body in 357B.C.
In spite of the formal differences of these four assemblies and the real distinction springing from the fact that patricians were not members of the plebeian bodies, the view which is appropriate to the developed Roman constitution is that the people expressed its will equally through all, although the mode of expression varied with the channel. This will was in theory unlimited. It was restricted only by the conservatism of the Roman, by the condition that the initiative must always be taken by a magistrate, by thede factoauthority of the senate, and by the magisterial veto which the senate often had at its command (seeSenate). There were no limitations on the legislative powers of thecomitiaexcept such as they chose to respect or which they themselves created and might repeal. They never during the Republican period lost the right of criminal jurisdiction, in spite of the fact that so many spheres of this jurisdiction had been assigned in perpetuity to standing commissions (quaestiones perpetuae). This power of judging exercised by the assemblies had in the main developed from the use of the right of appeal (provocatio) against the judgments of the magistrates. But it is probable that, in the developed procedure, where it was known that the judgment pronounced might legally give rise to the appeal, the magistrate pronounced no sentence, but brought the case at once before the people. The case was then heard in four separatecontiones. After these hearings thecomitiagave its verdict. Finally, the people elected to every magistracy with the exception of the occasional offices of Dictator and Interrex. The distribution of these functions amongst the variouscomitia, and the differences in their organization, were as follows:—
Thecomitia curiatahad in the later Republic become a merely formal assembly. Its main function was that of passing thelex curiatawhich was necessary for the ratification both of theimperiumof the higher magistracies of the people, and of thepotestasof those of lower rank. This assembly also met, under the name of thecomitia calataand under the presidency of the pontifex maximus, for certain religious acts. These were the inauguration of the rex sacrorum and the flamens, and that abjuration of hereditary worship (detestatio sacrorum) which was made by a man who passed from his clan (gens) either by an act of adrogation (seeRoman LawandAdoption) or by transition from the patrician to the plebeian order. For the purpose of passing thelex curiata, and probably for its other purposes as well, thiscomitiawas in Cicero’s day represented by but thirty lictors (Cic.de Lege Agraria, ii. 12, 31).
Thecomitia centuriatacould be summoned and presided over only by the magistrates withimperium. The consuls were its usual presidents for elections and for legislation, but the praetors summoned it for purposes of jurisdiction. It elected the magistrates withimperiumand the censors, and alone had the power of declaring war. According to the principle laid down in the Twelve Tables (Cicero,de Legibus, iii. 4. 11) capital cases were reserved for this assembly. It was not frequently employed as a legislative body after the two assemblies of the tribes, which were easier to summon and organize, had been recognized as possessing sovereign rights. The internal structure of thecomitia centuriataunderwent a great change during the Republic—a change which has been conjecturally attributed to the censorship of Flaminius in 220B.C.(Mommsen,Staatsrecht, iii. p. 270). In the early scheme, at a time when a pecuniary valuation had replaced land and its appurtenances (res mancipi) as the basis of qualification, five divisions (classes) were recognized whose property was assessed respectively at 100,000, 75,000, 50,000, 25,000 and 11,000 (or 12,500) asses. The first class contained 80 centuries; the second, third and fourth 20 each; the fifth 30. Added to these were the 18 centuries of knights (seeEquites). The combined vote of the first class and the knights was thus represented by 98 centuries; that of the whole of the otherclasses(including 4 or 5 centuries of professional corporations connected with the army, such as thefabriand 1 century ofproletarii,i.e.of all persons below the minimum census) was represented by 95 or 96 centuries. Thus the upper classes in the community possessed more than half the votes in the assembly. The newer scheme aimed at a greater equality of voting power; but it has been differently interpreted. The interpretation most usually accepted, which was first suggested by Pantagathus, a 17th-century scholar, is based on the view that the fiveclasseswere distributed over the tribes in such a manner that there were 2 centuries of each class in a single tribe. As the number of the tribes was 35, the total number of centuries would be 350. To these we must add 18 centuries of knights, 4 offabri, &c., and 1 ofproletarii. Here the first class and the knights command but 88 votes out of a total of 373. Mommsen’s interpretation (Staatsrecht, iii. p. 275) was different. He allowed the 70 votes for the 70 centuries of the first class, but thought that the 280 centuries of the other classes were so combined as to form only 100 votes. The total votes in the comitia would thus be 70 + 100 + 5 (fabri, &c.) + 18 (knights),i.e.193, as in the earlier arrangement. In 88B.C.a return was made to the original and more aristocratic system by a law passed by the consuls Sulla and Pompeius. At least this seems to be the meaning of Appian (Bellum Civile, i. 59) when he saysέσηγοῦντο ... τὰς χειροτονίας μὴ κατὰ φυλὰς ἀλλὰ κατὰ λόχους ... γίγνεσθαι. But this change was not permanent as the more liberal system prevails in the Ciceronian period.
Thecomitia tributawas in the later Republic the usual organ for laws passed by the whole people. Its presidents were the magistrates of the people, usually the consuls and praetors, and, for purposes of jurisdiction, the curule aediles. It elected these aediles and other lower magistrates of the people. Its jurisdiction was limited to monetary penalties.
Theconcilium plebis, although voting, like this last assembly, by tribes, could be summoned and presided over only by plebeian magistrates, and never included the patricians. Its utterances (plebiscita) had the full force of law; it elected the tribunes of the plebs and the plebeian aediles, and it pronounced judgment on the penalties which they proposed. The right of this assembly to exercise capital jurisdiction was questioned; but it possessed the undisputed right of pronouncing outlawry (aquae et ignis interdictio) against any one already in exile (Livy xxv. 4, and xxvi. 3).
When the tenure of the religious colleges—formerly filled up by co-optation—was submitted to popular election, a change effected by alex Domitiaof 104B.C., a new type ofcomitiawas devised for this purpose. The electoral body was composed of 17 tribes selected by lot from the whole body of 35.
There was a body of rules governing thecomitiawhich were concerned with the time and place of meeting, the forms of promulgation and the methods of voting. Valid meetings might be held on any of the 194 “comitial” days of the year which were not market or festal days (nundinae, feriae). Thecomitia curiataand the two assemblies of the tribes met within the walls, the former usually in the Comitium, the latter in the Forum or on the Area Capitolii; but the elections at these assemblies were in the later Republic held in the Campus Martius outside the walls. Thecomitia centuriatawas by law compelled to meet outside the city and its gathering place was usually the Campus. Promulgation was required for the space of 3nundinae(i.e.24 days) before a matter was submitted to the people. The voting was preceded by acontioat which a limited debate was permitted by the magistrate. In the assemblies of thecuriaeand the tribes the voting of the groups took place simultaneously, in that of the centuries in a fixed order. In elections as well as in legislative acts an absolute majority was required, and hence the candidate who gained a mere relative majority was not returned.
Thecomitiasurvived the Republic. The last known act of comitial legislation belongs to the reign of Nerva (A.D.96-98). After the essential elements in the election of magistrates had passed to the senate inA.D.14, the formal announcement of the successful candidates (renuntiatio) still continued to be made to the popular assemblies. Early in the 3rd century Dio Cassius still saw thecomitia centuriatameeting with all its old solemnities (Dio Cassius lviii. 20).
Bibliography.—Mommsen,Römisches Staatsrecht, iii. p. 300 foll. (3rd ed., Leipzig, 1887), andRömische Forschungen, Bd. i. (Berlin, 1879); Soltau,Entstehung und Zusammensetzung der altrömischen Volksversammlungen, andDie Gültigkeit der Plebiscite(Berlin, 1884); Huschke,Die Verfassung des Königs Servius Tullius als Grundlage zu einer römischen Verfassungsgeschichte(Heidelberg, 1838); Borgeaud,Le Plébiscite dans l’antiquité. Grèce et Rome(Geneva, 1838); Greenidge,Roman Public Life, p. 65 foll., 102, 238 foll. and App. i. (1901); G. W. Botsford,Roman Assemblies(1909).
Bibliography.—Mommsen,Römisches Staatsrecht, iii. p. 300 foll. (3rd ed., Leipzig, 1887), andRömische Forschungen, Bd. i. (Berlin, 1879); Soltau,Entstehung und Zusammensetzung der altrömischen Volksversammlungen, andDie Gültigkeit der Plebiscite(Berlin, 1884); Huschke,Die Verfassung des Königs Servius Tullius als Grundlage zu einer römischen Verfassungsgeschichte(Heidelberg, 1838); Borgeaud,Le Plébiscite dans l’antiquité. Grèce et Rome(Geneva, 1838); Greenidge,Roman Public Life, p. 65 foll., 102, 238 foll. and App. i. (1901); G. W. Botsford,Roman Assemblies(1909).
(A. H. J. G.)
COMITY(from the Lat.comitas, courtesy, fromcemis, friendly, courteous), friendly or courteous behaviour; a term particularly used in international law, in the phrase “comity of nations,” for the courtesy of nations towards each other. This has been held by some authorities to be the basis for the recognition by courts of law of the judgments and rules of law of foreign tribunals (seeInternational Law, Private). “Comity of nations” is sometimes wrongly used, from a confusion with the Latincomes, a companion, for the whole body or company of nations practising such international courtesy.
COMMA(Gr.κομμα, a thing stamped or cut off, fromκόπτειν, to strike), originally, in Greek rhetoric, a short clause, something less than the “colon”; hence a mark (,), in punctuation, to show the smallest break in the construction of a sentence. The mark is also used to separate numerals, mathematical symbols and the like. Inverted commas, or “quotation-marks,”i.e.pairs of commas, the first inverted, and the last upright, are placed at the beginning and end of a sentence or word quoted, or of a word used in a technical or conventional sense; single commas are similarly used for quotations within quotations. The word is also applied to comma-shaped objects, such as the “comma-bacillus,” the causal agent in cholera.
COMMANDEER(from the South African Dutchkommanderen, to command), properly, to compel the performance of military duty in the field, especially of the military service of the Boer republics (seeCommando); also to seize property for military purposes; hence used of any peremptory seizure for other than military purposes.
COMMANDER,in the British navy, the title of the second grade of captains. He commands a small vessel, or is second in command of a large one. A staff commander is entrusted with the navigation of a large ship, and ranks above a navigating lieutenant. Since 1838 the officer next in rank to a captain in the U.S. navy has been called commander.
COMMANDERY(through the Fr.commanderie, from med. Lat.commendaria, a trust or charge), a division of the landed property in Europe of the Knights Hospitallers (seeSt John of Jerusalem). The property of the order was divided into “priorates,” subdivided into “bailiwicks,” which in turn were divided into “commanderies”; these were placed in charge of a “commendator” or commander. The word is also applied to the emoluments granted to a commander of a military order of knights.
COMMANDO,a Portuguese word meaning “command,” adopted by the Boers in South Africa through whom it has come into English use, for military and semi-military expeditions against the natives. More particularly a “commando” was the administrative and tactical unit of the forces of the former Boer republics, “commandeered” under the law of the constitutions which made military service obligatory on all males between the ages of sixteen and sixty. Each “commando” was formed from the burghers of military age of an electoral district.
COMMEMORATION,a general term for celebrating some past event. It is also the name for the annual act, orEncaenia, the ceremonial closing of the academic year at Oxford University. It consists of a Latin oration in commemoration of benefactors and founders; of the recitation of prize compositions in prose and verse, and the conferring of honorary degrees upon English or foreign celebrities. The ceremony, which is usually on the third Wednesday after Trinity Sunday, is held in the Sheldonian Theatre, in Broad St., Oxford. “Commencement” is the term for the equivalent ceremony at Cambridge, and this is also used in the case of American universities.
COMMENDATION(from the Lat.commendare, to entrust to the charge of, or to procure a favour for), approval, especially when expressed to one person on behalf of another, a recommendation. The word is used in a liturgical sense for an office commending the souls of the dying and dead to the mercies of God. In feudal law the term is applied to the practice of a freeman placing himself under the protection of a lord (seeFeudalism), and in ecclesiastical law to the granting of beneficesin commendam. A benefice was heldin commendamwhen granted either temporarily until a vacancy was filled up, or to a layman, or, in case of a monastery or abbey, to a secular cleric to enjoy the revenues and privileges for life (seeAbbot), or to a bishop to hold together with his see. An act of 1836 prohibited the holding of beneficesin commendamin England.
COMMENTARII(Lat. = Gr.ὑπομνήματα), notes to assist the memory, memoranda. This original idea of the word gave rise to a variety of meanings: notes and abstracts of speeches for the assistance of orators; family memorials, the origin of many of the legends introduced into early Roman history from a desire to glorify a particular family; diaries of events occurring in their own circle kept by private individuals,—the day-book, drawn up for Trimalchio in Petronius (Satyricon, 53) by hisactuarius(a slave to whom the duty was specially assigned) is quoted as an example; memoirs of events in which they had taken part drawn up by public men,—such were the “Commentaries” of Caesar on theGallic and Civil wars, and of Cicero on his consulship. Different departments of the imperial administration and certain high functionaries kept records, which were under the charge of an official known as acommentariis(cf.a secretis,ab epistulis). Municipal authorities also kept a register of their official acts.
TheCommentarii Principiswere the register of the official acts of the emperor. They contained the decisions, favourable or unfavourable, in regard to certain citizens; accusations brought before him or ordered by him; lists of persons in receipt of special privileges. These must be distinguished from thecommentarii diurni, a daily court-journal. At a later period records calledephemerideswere kept by order of the emperor; these were much used by the Scriptores Historiae Augustae (seeAugustan History). TheCommentarii Senatus, only once mentioned (Tacitus,Annals, xv. 74) are probably identical with the Acta Senatus (q.v.). There were also Commentarii of the priestly colleges: (a)Pontificum, collections of their decrees and responses for future reference, to be distinguished from theirAnnales, which were historical records, and from theirActa, minutes of their meetings; (b)Augurum, similar collections of augural decrees and responses; (c)Decemvirorum; (d)Fratrum Arvalium. Like the priests, the magistrates also had similar notes, partly written by themselves, and partly records of which they formed the subject. But practically nothing is known of theseCommentarii Magistratuum. Mention should also be made of theCommentarii Regum, containing decrees concerning the functions and privileges of the kings, and forming a record of the acts of the king in his capacity of priest. They were drawn up in historical times like the so-calledleges regiae(jus Papirianum), supposed to contain the decrees and decisions of the Roman kings.
See the exhaustive article by A. von Premerstein in Pauly-Wissowa,Realencyclopädie(1901); Teuffel-Schwabe,Hist. of Roman Lit.(Eng. trans.), pp. 72, 77-79; and the concise account by H. Thédenat in Daremberg and Saglio,Dictionnaire des antiquités.
See the exhaustive article by A. von Premerstein in Pauly-Wissowa,Realencyclopädie(1901); Teuffel-Schwabe,Hist. of Roman Lit.(Eng. trans.), pp. 72, 77-79; and the concise account by H. Thédenat in Daremberg and Saglio,Dictionnaire des antiquités.
COMMENTRY,a town of central France, in the department of Allier, 42 m. S.W. of Moulins by the Orléans railway. Pop. (1906) 7581. Commentry gives its name to a coalfield over 5000 acres in extent, and has important foundries and forges.
COMMERCE(Lat.commercium, fromcum, together, andmerx, merchandise), in its general acceptation, the international traffic in goods, or what constitutes the foreign trade of all countries as distinct from their domestic trade.
In tracing the history of such dealings we may go back to the early records found in the Hebrew Scriptures. Such a transaction as that of Abraham, for example, weighing down “four hundred shekels of silver,current with the merchant,” for the field of Ephron, is suggestive of a group of facts and ideas indicating an advanced condition of commercial intercourse,—property in land, sale of land, arts of mining and purifying metals, the use of silver of recognized purity as a common medium of exchange, and merchandise an established profession, or division of labour. That other passage in which we read of Joseph being sold by his brethren for twenty pieces of silver to “a company of Ishmaelites, coming from Gilead, with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh to Egypt,” extends our vision still farther, and shows us the populous and fertile Egypt in commercial relationship with Chaldaea, and Arabians, foreign to both, as intermediaries in their traffic, generations before the Hebrew commonwealth was founded.
The first foreign merchants of whom we read, carrying goods and bags of silver from one distant region to another, were the southern Arabs, reputed descendants of Ishmael and Esau. The first notable navigators and maritime carriers of goods were the Phoenicians. In the commerce of the ante-Christian ages the Jews do not appear to have performed any conspicuous part. Both the agricultural and the theocratic constitution of their society were unfavourable to a vigorous prosecution of foreign trade. In such traffic as they had with other nations they were served on their eastern borders by Arabian merchants, and on the west and south by the Phoenician shippers. The abundance of gold, silver and other precious commodities gathered from distant parts, of which we read in the days of greatest Hebrew prosperity, has more the character of spoils of war and tributes of dependent states than the conquest by free exchange of their domestic produce and manufacture. It was not until the Jews were scattered by foreign invasions, and finally cast into the world by the destruction of Jerusalem, that they began to develop those commercial qualities for which they have since been famous.
There are three conditions as essential to extensive international traffic as diversity of natural resources, division of labour, accumulation of stock, or any other primal element—(1) means of transport, (2) freedom of labourPrimary conditions of commerce.and exchange, and (3) security; and in all these conditions the ancient world was signally deficient.
The great rivers, which became the first seats of population and empire, must have been of much utility as channels of transport, and hence the course of human power of which they are the geographical delineation, and probably the idolatry with which they were sometimes honoured. Nor were the ancient rulers insensible of the importance of opening roads through their dominions, and establishing post and lines of communication, which, though primarily for official and military purposes, must have been useful to traffickers and to the general population. But the free navigable area of great rivers is limited, and when diversion of traffic had to be made to roads and tracks through deserts, there remained the slow and costly carriage of beasts of burden, by which only articles of small bulk and the rarest value could be conveyed with any hope of profit. Corn, though of the first necessity, could only be thus transported in famines, when beyond price to those who were in want, and under this extreme pressure could only be drawn from within a narrow sphere, and in quantity sufficient to the sustenance of but a small number of people. The routes of ancient commerce were thus interrupted and cut asunder by barriers of transport, and the farther they were extended became the more impassable to any considerable quantity or weight of commodities. As long as navigation was confined to rivers and the shores of inland gulfs and seas, the oceans were aterra incognita, contributing nothing to the facility or security of transport from one part of the world to another, and leaving even one populous part of Asia as unapproachable from another as if they had been in different hemispheres. The various routes of trade from Europe and north-western Asia to India, which have been often referred to, are to be regarded more as speculations of future development than as realities of ancient history. It is not improbable that the ancient traffic of the Red Sea may have been extended along the shores of the Arabian Sea to some parts of Hindustan, but that vessels braved the Indian Ocean and passed round Cape Comorin into the Bay of Bengal, 2000 or even 1000 years before mariners had learned to double the Cape of Good Hope, is scarcely to be believed. The route by the Euxine and the Caspian Sea has probably never in any age reached India. That by the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf is shorter, and was besides the more likely from passing through tracts of country which in the most remote times were seats of great population. There may have been many merchants who traded on all these various routes, but that commodities were passed in bulk over great distances is inconceivable. It may be doubted whether in the ante-Christian ages there was any heavy transport over even 500 m., save for warlike or other purposes, which engaged the public resources of imperial states, and in which the idea of commerce, as now understood, is in a great measure lost.
The advantage which absolute power gave to ancient nations in their warlike enterprises, and in the execution of public works of more or less utility, or of mere ostentation and monumental magnificence, was dearly purchased by the sacrifice of individual freedom, the right to labour, produce and exchange under the steady operation of natural economic principles, which more than any other cause vitalizes 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 somethingdesirable 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 constantpillage, 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 any means of prosperity from without. Their sole policy was either to absorb under their own spirit and conditions of rule, or to destroy, whatever was rich or great beyond their borders. Nothing is more marked in the past history of the world than this struggle of commerce to establish conditions of security and means of communication with distant parts. When almost driven from the land, it often found both on the sea; and often, when its success had become brilliant and renowned, it perished under the assault of stronger powers, only to rise again in new centres and to find new channels of intercourse.
While Rome was giving laws and order to the half-civilized tribes of Italy, Carthage, operating on a different base, and by other methods, was opening trade with less accessible parts of Europe. The strength of Rome was in herCarthage.legions, that of Carthage in her ships; and her ships could cover ground where the legions were powerless. Her mariners had passed the mythical straits into the Atlantic, and established the port of Cadiz. Within the Mediterranean itself they founded Carthagena and Barcelona on the same Iberian peninsula, and ahead of the Roman legions had depots and traders on the shores of Gaul. After the destruction of Tyre, Carthage became the greatest power in the Mediterranean, and inherited the trade of her Phoenician ancestors with Egypt, Greece and Asia Minor, as well as her own settlements in Sicily and on the European coasts. An antagonism between the great naval and the great military power, whose interests crossed each other at so many points, was sure to occur; and in the three Punic wars Carthage measured her strength with that of Rome both on sea and on land with no unequal success. But a commercial state impelled into a series of great wars has departed from its own proper base; and in the year 146B.C.Carthage was so totally destroyed by theRoman conquests.Romans that of the great city, more than 20 m. in circumference, and containing at one period near a million of inhabitants, only a few thousands were found within its ruined walls. In the same year Corinth, one of the greatest of the Greek capitals and seaports, was captured, plundered of vast wealth and given to the flames by a Roman consul. Athens and her magnificent harbour of the Piraeus fell into the same hands 60 years later. It may be presumed that trade went on under the Roman conquests in some degree as before; but these were grave events to occur within a brief period, and the spirit of the seat of trade in every case having been broken, and its means and resources more or less plundered and dissipated—in some cases, as in that of Carthage, irreparably—the most necessary commerce could only proceed with feeble and languid interest under the military, consular and proconsular licence of Rome at that period. Tyre, the great seaport of Palestine, having been destroyed by Alexander the Great, Palmyra, the great inland centre of Syrian trade, was visited with a still more complete annihilation by the Roman Emperor Aurelian within little more than half a century after the capture and spoliation of Athens. The walls were razed to their foundations; the population—men, women, children and the rustics round the city—were all either massacred or dispersed; and the queen Zenobia was carried captive to Rome. Palmyra had for centuries, as a centre of commercial intercourse and transit, been of great service to her neighbours, east and west. In the wars of the Romans and Parthians she was respected by both as an asylum of common interests which it would have been simple barbarity to invade or injure; and when the Parthians were subdued, and Palmyra became a Romanannexe, she continued to flourish as before. Her relations with Rome were more than friendly; they became enthusiastic and heroic; and her citizens having inflicted signal chastisement on the king of Persia for the imprisonment of the emperor Valerian, the admiration of this conduct at Rome was so great that their spirited leader Odaenathus, the husband of Zenobia, was proclaimed Augustus, and became co-emperor with Gallienus. It is obvious that the destruction of Palmyra must not only have doomedPalmyra.Palestine, already bereft of her seaports, to greater poverty and commercial isolation than had been known in long preceding ages, but have also rendered it more difficult to Rome herself to hold or turn to any profitable account her conquests in Asia; and, being an example of the policy of Rome to the seats of trade over nearly the whole ancient world, it may be said to contain in graphic characters a presage of what came to be the actual event—the collapse and fall of the Roman empire itself.
The repeated invasions of Italy by the Goths and Huns gave rise to a seat of trade in the Adriatic, which was to sustain during more than a thousand years a history of unusual splendour. The Veneti cultivated fertile lands on theVenice.Po, and built several towns, of which Padua was the chief. They appear from the earliest note of them in history to have been both an agricultural and trading people; and they offered a rich prey to the barbarian hordes when these broke through every barrier into the plains of Italy. Thirty years before Attila razed the neighbouring city of Aquileia, the consuls and senate of Padua, oppressed and terrified by the prior ravages of Alaric, passed a decree for erecting Rialto, the largest of the numerous islets at the mouth of the Po, into a chief town and port, not more as a convenience to the islanders than as a security for themselves and their goods. But every fresh incursion, every new act of spoliation by the dreaded enemies, increased the flight of the rich and the industrious to the islands, and thus gradually arose the second Venice, whose glory was so greatly to exceed that of the first. Approachable from the mainland only by boats, through river passes easily defended by practised sailors against barbarians who had never plied an oar, the Venetian refugees could look in peace on the desolation which swept over Italy; their warehouses, their markets, their treasures were safe from plunder; and stretching their hands over the sea, they found in it fish and salt, and in the rich possessions of trade and territory which it opened to them more than compensation for the fat lands and inland towns which had long been their home. The Venetians traded with Constantinople, Greece, Syria and Egypt. They became lords of the Morea, and of Candia, Cyprus and other islands of the Levant. The trade of Venice with India, though spoken of, was probably never great. But the crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries against the Saracens in Palestineextended her repute more widely east and west, and increased both her naval and her commercial resources. It is enough, indeed, to account for the grandeur of Venice that in course of centuries, from the security of her position, the growth and energy of her population, and the regularity of her government at a period when these sources of prosperity were rare, she became the great emporium of the Mediterranean—all that Carthage, Corinth and Athens had been in a former age on a scene the most remarkable in the world for its fertility and facilities of traffic,—and that as Italy and other parts of the Western empire became again more settled her commerce found always a wider range. The bridge built from the largest of the islands to the opposite bank became the “Rialto,” or famous exchange of Venice, whose transactions reached farther, and assumed a more consolidated form, than had been known before. There it was where the first public bank was organized; that bills of exchange were first negotiated, and funded debt became transferable; that finance became a science and book-keeping an art. Nor must the effect of the example of Venice on other cities of Italy be left out of account. Genoa, following her steps, rose into great prosperity and power at the foot of the Maritime Alps, and became her rival, and finally her enemy. Naples, Gaeta, Florence, many other towns of Italy, and Rome herself, long after her fall, were encouraged to struggle for the preservation of their municipal freedom, and to foster trade, arts and navigation, by the brilliant success set before them on the Adriatic; but Venice, from the early start she had made, and her command of the sea, had the commercial pre-eminence.
The state of things which arose on the collapse of the Roman empire presents two concurrent facts, deeply affecting the course of trade—(1) the ancient seats of industry and civilization were undergoing constant decay, while (2) theThe middle ages.energetic races of Europe were rising into more civilized forms and manifold vigour and copiousness of life. The fall of the Eastern division of the empire prolonged the effect of the fall of the Western empire; and the advance of the Saracens over Asia Minor, Syria, Greece, Egypt, over Cyprus and other possessions of Venice in the Mediterranean, over the richest provinces of Spain, and finally across the Hellespont into the Danubian provinces of Europe, was a new irruption of barbarians from another point of the compass, and revived the calamities and disorders inflicted by the successive invasions of Goths, Huns and other Northern tribes. For more than ten centuries the naked power of the sword was vivid and terrible as flashes of lightning over all the seats of commerce, whether of ancient or more modern origin. The feudal system of Europe, in organizing the open country under military leaders and defenders subordinated in possession and service under a legal system to each other and to the sovereign power, must have been well adapted to the necessity of the times in which it spread so rapidly; but it would be impossible to say that the feudal system was favourable to trade, or the extension of trade. The commercial spirit in the feudal, as in preceding ages, had to find for itself places of security, and it could only find them in towns, armed with powers of self-regulation and defence, and prepared, like the feudal barons themselves, to resist violence from whatever quarter it might come. Rome, in her best days, had founded the municipal system, and when this system was more than ever necessary as the bulwark of arts and manufactures, its extension became an essential element of the whole European civilization. Towns formed themselves into leagues for mutual protection, and out of leagues not infrequently arose commercial republics. The Hanseatic League, founded as early as 1241, gave the first note of an increasing traffic between countries on the Baltic and in northern Germany, which a century or two before were sunk in isolated barbarism. From Lübeck and Hamburg, commanding the navigation of the Elbe, it gradually spread over 85 towns, including Amsterdam, Cologne and Frankfort in the south, and Danzig, Königsberg and Riga in the north. The last trace of this league, long of much service in protecting trade, and as a means of political mediation, passed away in the erection of the German empire (1870), but only from the same cause that had brought about its gradual dissolution—the formation of powerful and legal governments—which, while leaving to the free cities their municipal rights, were well capable of protecting their mercantile interests. The towns of Holland found lasting strength and security from other causes. Their foundations were laid as literally in the sea as those of Venice had been. They were not easily attacked whether by sea or land, and if attacked had formidable means of defence. The Zuyder Zee, which had been opened to the German Ocean in 1282, carried into the docks and canals of Amsterdam the traffic of the ports of the Baltic, of the English Channel and of the south of Europe, and what the seas did for Amsterdam from without the Rhine and the Maese did for Dort and Rotterdam from the interior. By the Union of Utrecht in 1579 Holland became an independent republic, and for long after, as it had been for some time before, was the greatest centre of maritime traffic in Europe. The rise of the Dutch power in a low country, exposed to the most destructive inundations, difficult to cultivate or even to inhabit, affords a striking illustration of those conditions which in all times have been found specially favourable to commercial development, and which are not indistinctly reflected in the mercantile history of England, preserved by its insular position from hostile invasions, and capable by its fleets and arms to protect its goods on the seas and the rights of its subjects in foreign lands.
The progress of trade and productive arts in the middle ages, though not rising to much international exchange, was very considerable both in quality and extent. The republics of Italy, which had no claim to rival Venice or Genoa in maritime power or traffic, developed a degree of art, opulence and refinement commanding the admiration of modern times; and if any historian of trans-Alpine Europe, when Venice had already attained some greatness, could have seen it five hundred years afterwards, the many strong towns of France, Germany and the Low Countries, the great number of their artizans, the products of their looms and anvils, and their various cunning workmanship, might have added many a brilliant page to his annals. Two centuries before England had discovered any manufacturing quality, or knew even how to utilize her most valuable raw materials, and was importing goods from the continent for the production of which she was soon to be found to have special resources, the Flemings were selling their woollen and linen fabrics, and the French their wines, silks and laces in all the richer parts of the British Islands. The middle ages placed the barbarous populations of Europe under a severe discipline, trained them in the most varied branches of industry, and developed an amount of handicraft and ingenuity which became a solid basis for the future. But trade was too walled in, too much clad in armour, and too incessantly disturbed by wars and tumults, and violations of common right and interest, to exert its full influence over the general society, or even to realize its most direct advantages. It wanted especially the freedom and mobility essential to much international increase, and these it was now to receive from a series of the most pregnant events.
The mariner’s compass had become familiar in the European ports about the beginning of the 14th century, and the seamen of Italy, Portugal, France, Holland and England entered upon a more enlightened and adventurousOpening of a new era.course of navigation. The Canary Islands were sighted by a French vessel in 1330, and colonized in 1418 by the Portuguese, who two years later landed on Madeira. In 1431 the Azores were discovered by a shipmaster of Bruges. The Atlantic was being gradually explored. In 1486, Diaz, a Portuguese, steering his course almost unwittingly along the coast of Africa, came upon the land’s-end of that continent; and eleven years afterwards Vasco da Gama, of the same nation, not only doubled the Cape of Good Hope, but reached India. About the same period Portuguese travellers penetrated to India by the old time-honoured way of Suez; and a land which tradition and imagination had invested with almost fabulous wealth and splendour was becoming more real to the European world at the moment when the expedition of Vasco da Gama had made an oceanic route to its shores distinctly visible. One can hardly now realize the impression made by these discoveriesin an age when the minds of men were awakening out of a long sleep, when the printing press was disseminating the ancient classical and sacred literature, and when geography and astronomy were subjects of eager study in the seats both of traffic and of learning. But their practical effect was seen in swiftly-succeeding events. Before the end of the century Columbus had thrice crossed the Atlantic, touched at San Salvador, discovered Jamaica, Porto Rico and the Isthmus of Darien, and had seen the waters of the Orinoco in South America. Meanwhile Cabot, sent out by England, had discovered Newfoundland, planted the English flag on Labrador, Nova Scotia and Virginia, and made known the existence of an expanse of land now known as Canada. This tide of discovery by navigators flowed on without intermission. But the opening of a maritime route to India and the discovery of America, surprising as these events must have been at the time, were slow in producing the results of which they were a sure prognostic. The Portuguese established in Cochin the first European factory in India a few years after Vasco da Gama’s expedition, and other maritime nations of Europe traced a similar course. But it was not till 1600 that the English East India Company was established, and the opening of the first factory of the Company in India must be dated some ten or eleven years later. So also it was one thing to discover the two Americas, and another, in any real sense, to possess or colonize them, or to bring their productions into the general traffic and use of the world. Spain, following the stroke of the valiant oar of Columbus, found in Mexico and Peru remarkable remains of an ancient though feeble civilization, and a wealth of gold and silver mines, which to Europeans of that period was fascinating from the rarity of the precious metals in their own realms, and consequently gave to the Spanish colonizations and conquests in South America an extraordinary but unsolid prosperity. The value of the precious metals in Europe was found to fall as soon as they began to be more widely distributed, a process in itself at that period of no small tediousness; and it was discovered further, after a century or two, that the production of gold and silver is limited like the production of other commodities for which they exchange, and only increased in quantity at a heavier cost, that is only reduced again by greater art and science in the process of production. Many difficulties, in short, had to be overcome, many wars to be waged, and many deplorable errors to be committed, in turning the new advantages to account. But given a maritime route to India and the discovery of a new world of continent and islands in the richest tropical and sub-tropical latitudes, it could not be difficult to foresee that the course of trade was to be wholly changed as well as vastly extended.
The substantial advantage of the oceanic passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope, as seen at the time, was to enable European trade with the East to escape from the Moors, Algerines and Turks who now swarmed round theMaritime route to India.shores of the Mediterranean, and waged a predatory war on ships and cargoes which would have been a formidable obstacle even if traffic, after running this danger, had not to be further lost, or filtered into the smallest proportions, in the sands of the Isthmus, and among the Arabs who commanded the navigation of the Red and Arabian Seas. Venice had already begun to decline in her wars with the Turks, and could inadequately protect her own trade in the Mediterranean. Armed vessels sent out in strength from the Western ports often fared badly at the hands of the pirates. European trade with India can scarcely be said, indeed, to have yet come into existence. The maritime route was round about, and it lay on the hitherto almost untrodden ocean, but the ocean was a safer element than inland seas and deserts infested by the lawlessness and ferocity of hostile tribes of men. In short, the maritime route enabled European traders to see India for themselves, to examine what were its products and its wants, and by what means a profitable exchange on both sides could be established; and on this basis of knowledge, ships could leave the ports of their owners in Europe with a reasonable hope, via the Cape, of reaching the places to which they were destined without transhipment or other intermediary obstacle. This is the explanation to be given of the joy with which the Cape of Good Hope route was received, as well as the immense influence it exerted on the future course and extension of trade, and of the no less apparent satisfaction with which it was to some extent discarded in favour of the ancient line, via the Mediterranean, Isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea.
The maritime route to India was the discovery to the European nations of a “new world” quite as much as the discovery of North and South America and their central isthmus and islands. The one was the far, populous Eastern world,Discovery of America.heard of from time immemorial, but with which there had been no patent lines of communication. The other was a vast and comparatively unpeopled solitude, yet full of material resources, and capable in a high degree of European colonization. America offered less resistance to the action of Europe than India, China and Japan; but on the other hand this new populous Eastern world held out much attraction to trade. These two great terrestrial discoveries were contemporaneous; and it would be difficult to name any conjuncture of material events bearing with such importance on the history of the world. The Atlantic Ocean was the medium of both; and the waves of the Atlantic beat into all the bays and tidal rivers of western Europe. The centre of commercial activity was thus physically changed; and the formative power of trade over human affairs was seen in the subsequent phenomena—the rise of great seaports on the Atlantic seaboard, and the ceaseless activity of geographical exploration, manufactures, shipping and emigration, of which they became the outlets.
The Portuguese are entitled to the first place in utilizing the new sources of wealth and commerce. They obtained Macao as a settlement from the Chinese as early as 1537, and their trading operations followed close on the discoveries ofIncrease of trading settlements and colonies.their navigators on the coast of Africa, in India and in the Indian Archipelago. Spain spread her dominion over Central and South America, and forced the labour of the subject natives into the gold and silver mines, which seemed in that age the chief prize of her conquests. France introduced her trade in both the East and West Indies, and was the first to colonize Canada and the Lower Mississippi. The Dutch founded New York in 1621; and England, which in boldness of naval and commercial enterprize had attained high rank in the reign of Elizabeth, established the thirteen colonies which became the United States, and otherwise had a full share in all the operations which were transforming the state of the world. The original disposition of affairs was destined to be much changed by the fortune of war; and success in foreign trade and colonization, indeed, called into play other qualities besides those of naval and military prowess. The products of so many new countries—tissues, dyes, metals, articles of food, chemical substances—greatly extended the range of European manufacture. But in addition to the mercantile faculty of discovering how they were to be exchanged and wrought into a profitable trade, their use in arts and manufactures required skill, invention and aptitude for manufacturing labour, and those again, in many cases, were found to depend on abundant possession of natural materials, such as coal and iron. In old and populous countries, like India and China, modern manufacture had to meet and contend with ancient manufacture, and had at once to learn from and improve economically on the established models, before an opening could be made for its extension. In many parts of the New World there were vast tracts of country, without population or with native races too wild and savage to be reclaimed to habits of industry, whose resources could only be developed by the introduction of colonies of Europeans; and innumerable experiments disclosed great variety of qualification among the European nations for the adventure, hardship and perseverance of colonial life. There were countries which, whatever their fertility of soil or favour of climate, produced nothing for which a market could be found; and products such as the sugar-cane and the seed of the cotton plant had to be carried from regions where they were indigenous to other regions where they might be successfully cultivated, and the art of planting had to pass through an ordeal of risk and speculation. There werealso countries where no European could labour; and the ominous work of transporting African negroes as slaves into the colonies—begun by Spain in the first decade of the 16th century, followed up by Portugal, and introduced by England in 1562 into the West Indies, at a later period into New England and the Southern States, and finally domiciled by royal privilege of trade in the Thames and three or more outports of the kingdom,—after being done on an elaborate scale, and made the basis of an immense superstructure of labour, property and mercantile interest over nearly three centuries, had, under a more just and ennobling view of humanity, to be as elaborately undone at a future time.
These are some of the difficulties that had to be encountered in utilizing the great maritime and geographical conquests of the new epoch. But one cannot leave out of view the obstacles, arising from other sources, to what might be expected to be the regular and easy course of affairs. Commerce, though an undying and prevailing interest of civilized countries, is but one of the forces acting on the policy of states, and has often to yield the pace to other elements of national life. It were needless to say what injury the great but vain and purposeless wars of Louis XIV. of France inflicted in that country, or how largely the fruitful and heroic energies of England were absorbed in the civil wars between Charles and the Parliament, to what poverty Scotland was reduced, or in what distraction and savagery Ireland was kept by the same course of events. The grandeur of Spain in the preceding century was due partly to the claim of her kings to be Holy Roman emperors, in which imperial capacity they entailed intolerable mischief on the Low Countries and on the commercial civilization of Europe, and partly to their command of the gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru, in an eager lust of whose produce they brought cruel calamities on a newly-discovered continent where there were many traces of antique life, the records of which perished in their hands or under their feet. These ephemeral causes of greatness removed, the hollowness of the situation was exposed; and Spain, though rich in her own natural resources, was found to be actually poor—poor in number of people, poor in roads, in industrial art, and in all the primary conditions of interior development. An examination of the foreign trade of Europe two centuries after the opening of the maritime route to India and the discovery of America would probably give more reason to be surprised at the smallness than the magnitude of the use that had been made of these events.
By the beginning of the 19th century the world had been well explored. Colonies had been planted on every coast; great nations had sprung up in vast solitudes or in countries inhabited only by savage or decadent races of men;19th century.the most haughty and exclusive of ancient nations had opened their ports to foreign merchantmen; and all parts of the world been brought into habitual commercial intercourse. The seas, subdued by the progress of navigation to the service of man, had begun to yield their own riches in great abundance and the whale, seal, herring, cod and other fisheries, prosecuted with ample capital and hardy seamanship, had become the source of no small traffic in themselves. The lists of imports and exports and of the places from which they flowed to and from the centres of trade, as they swelled in bulk from time to time, show how busily and steadily the threads of commerce had been weaving together the labour and interests of mankind, and extending a security and bounty of existence unknown in former ages. The 19th century witnessed an extension of the commercial relations of mankind of which there was no parallel in previous history. The heavy debts and taxes, and the currency complications in which the close of the Napoleonic wars left the European nations, as well as the fall of prices which was the necessary effect of the sudden closure of a vast war expenditure and absorption of labour, had a crippling effect for many years on trading energies. Yet even under such circumstances commerce is usually found, on its well-established modern basis, to make steady progress from one series of years to another. The powers of production had been greatly increased by a brilliant development of mechanical arts and inventions. The United States had grown into a commercial nation of the first rank. The European colonies and settlements were being extended, and assiduously cultivated, and were opening larger and more varied markets for manufactures. In 1819 the first steamboat crossed the Atlantic from New York to Liverpool, and a similar adventure was accomplished from England to India in 1825—events in themselves the harbingers of a new era in trade. China, after many efforts, was opened under treaty to an intercourse with foreign nations which was soon to attain surprising dimensions. These various causes supported the activity of commerce in the first four decades; but the great movement which made the 19th century so remarkable was chiefly disclosed in practical results from about 1840. The outstanding characteristics of the 19th century were the many remarkable inventions which so widened the field of commerce by the discovery of new and improved methods of production, the highly organized division of labour which tended to the same end, and, above all, the powerful forces of steam navigation, railways and telegraphs.
Commerce has thus acquired a security and extension, in all its most essential conditions, of which it was void in any previous age. It can hardly ever again exhibit that wandering course from route to route, and from one solitary centre to another, which is so characteristic of its ancient history, because it is established in every quarter of the globe, and all the seas and ways are open to it on terms fair and equal to every nation. Wherever there is population, industry, resource, art and skill, there will be international trade. Commerce will have many centres, and one may relatively rise or relatively fall; but such decay and ruin as have smitten many once proud seats of wealth into dust cannot again occur without such cataclysms of war, violence and disorder as the growing civilization and reason of mankind, and the power of law, right and common interest forbid us to anticipate. But the present magnitude of commerce devolves serious work on all who are engaged in it. If in the older times it was thought that a foreign merchant required to be not only a good man of business, but even a statesman, it is evident that all the higher faculties of the mercantile profession must still more be called into request when imports and exports are reckoned by hundreds instead of fives or tens of millions, when the markets are so much larger and more numerous, the competition so much more keen and varied, the problems to be solved in every course of transaction so much more complex, the whole range of affairs to be overseen so immensely widened. It is not a company of merchants, having a monopoly, and doing whatever they please, whether right or wrong, that now hold the commerce of the world in their hands, but large communities of free merchants in all parts of the world, affiliated to manufacturers and producers equally free, each under strong temptation to do what may be wrong in the pursuit of his own interest, and the only security of doing right being to follow steady lights of information and economic science common to all. Easy transport of goods by land and sea, prompt intelligence from every point of the compass, general prevalence of mercantile law and safety, have all been accomplished; and the world is opened to trade. But intellectual grasp of principles and details, and the moral integrity which is the root of all commercial success, are severely tested in this vaster sphere.