64 OBJECTS OF MODERN COMMERCE. 
alone exporting 56,000,000 gallons in that year—palm-oil recently 
introduced into commerce, and now imported into England 
from the coast of Africa at the rate of forty or fifty thousand 
tuns a year, these alone undoubtedly give employment to more 
shipping than the whole commerce of Italy—with the excep- 
tion of wheat—at the most flourishing period of the Roman 
empire.* England imports annually about 600,000 tons of 
sugar, 100,000 tons of jute, and about the same quantity of 
esparto, six million tons of cotton, of which the value of 
$30,000,000 is exported again in the form of manufactured 
goods—including, by a strange industrial revolution, a large 
amount of cotton yarn and cotton tissues sent to India and 
directly or indirectly paid for by raw cotton to be manufactured 
in England—30,000 tons of tobacco, from 100,000 to 850,000 
tons of guano, hundreds of thousands of tons of tea, coffee, 
cacao, caoutchoue, gutta-percha and numerous other important 
articles of trade wholly unknown, as objects of commerce, to 
the ancient European world; and this immense importation is 
balanced by a corresponding amount of exportation, not consist- 
* A very few years since, the United States had more than six hundred large 
ships engaged in the whale fishery, and the number of American whalers, in spite 
of the introduction of many new sources of oils, still amounts to two hundred 
and fifty. 
The city of Rome imported from Sicily, from Africa, and from the Levant, 
enormous quantities of grain for gratuitous distribution among the lower 
classes of the capital. The pecuniary value of the gems, the spices, the 
unguents, the perfumes, the cosmetics and the tissues, which came principally 
from the East, was great, but these articles were neither heavy nor bulky and 
their transportation required but a small amount of shipping. The marbles, 
the obelisks, the statuary and other objects of art plundered in conquered 
provinces by Roman generals and governors, the wild animals, such as elephants, 
rhinoceroses, hippopotami, camelopards and the larger beasts of prey imported 
for slaughter at the public games, and the prisoners captured in foreign wars 
and brought to Italy for sale as slaves or butchery as gladiators, furnished 
employment for much more tonnage than all the legitimate commerce of the 
empire, with the possible exception of wheat. 
Independently of the direct testimony of Latin authors, the Greek statuary, 
the Egyptian obelisks, and the vast quantities of foreign marbles, granite, por- 
phyry, basalt, and other stones used in sculpture and in architecture, which 
