THE EVOLUTION OF COMMERCE. 651 
of the continent, where the great rivers, the Rhine and Scheldt, emp- 
tied into the North Sea, and where it was hard to tell whether it was 
land or water. In this region, outcast of ocean and earth, a little nation 
wrested from both domains their richest treasures. 
The commerce of the Hanseatic Towns, which had depended for their 
trade on Venice and Genoa, became less and less as the glory of those 
cities waned. Antwerp, with its deep and convenient rivers, stretched 
its arms to the ocean and caught the golden harvest as it fell from its 
sisters’ grasp. No city except Paris surpassed it in population; none 
approached it in splendor. It became the commercial center and banker 
of Europe; 5,00C merchants daily assembled on its exchange; 2,500 
vessels were often seen at once in its harbor, and 500 daily made their 
entrance into it. The manufactures of Flanders and the Netherlands 
had been noted for many generations, and now vastly increased, were 
distributed all over the world. The Netherlands, though the small- 
est, became the wealthiest nation of Europe. Then came the long-con- 
tinued war with Spain, ending in the siege and fall of Antwerp, and in 
the imposition of such taxation as no other country had ever endured. 
As Antwerp had grown on the ruins of the Hanseatic Towns, so her fall 
became England’s gain. 
France and England.—In America, north of Mexico, neither silver nor 
gold had been found to tempt the Spanish and Portuguese. The larger 
portion of the northern Atlantic coast was one long sand beach, broken 
by great estuaries and the mouths of great rivers; the rest was rocky 
and rugged, the temperature generally cold, the land unfertile and 
barren. For these reasons North America was left to the French and 
English. The French claimed Canada and the whole of the territory 
of the United States save a narrow strip of land on the Atlantic coast. 
The French population was small, and was made up principally of fur- 
traders and half-breeds; Great Britain held New England, Virginia, 
and the Carolinas. 
After the first fever of religious colonization had passed, about the 
commencement of the eighteenth century, there was scarcely any emi- 
gration from England to America and but little trade between the two 
countries. The population of North America was small, its commerce 
less, with little profit to the European merchants. ‘The country pos- 
sessed no peculiar advantages for the production of articles of value 
in foreign markets; there was nothing, therefore, to invite immigration 
or commerce. 
The chief inducement to the English to navigate the Atlantic was 
the hope of capturing the treasure-laden Spanish galleons and the rich 
Spanish cities. 
Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, and other navigators, aided 
by Queen Elizabeth, with bands of buccaneers, refugees from all coun- 
tries, though mostly Englishmen, explored the recesses of the Carib- 
bean Sea, crossed the Isthmus of Panama, and launched their little 
