454 ON THE PRICE OF FOREIGN PRODUCE. 



which Digges and Mun commented. Later on, the scanty 

 evidence which has come before me shows that the price was 

 rising. I assign the fact to the monopoly which the Dutch 

 had obtained of the spice islands, to the energetic means 

 which they took to secure or extend the monopoly, and es- 

 pecially to the practice they adopted of bribing or forcing the 

 native princes to destroy all the trees to which possible inter- 

 lopers might have access. We are expressly told that the 

 English had numerous factories in the spice islands, that 

 they abandoned some of them, and were squeezed out of 

 others by the Dutch. Now it will not be surprising that 

 the East India merchants were able to instigate that bitter 

 hostility to Holland which can be found in all seventeenth- 

 century English literature and indeed onwards, and to 

 foment those prejudices to which Selden, Swift, Arbuthnot, 

 and Defoe gave expression. I feel sure that the extreme 

 unfairness with which the English Governments treated 

 Holland was the outcome of that unhappy commercial 

 policy, under which Dutch trade was more unwise and gras- 

 ping than even the Spanish and English colonial systems 

 were. 



MACE. This is the costliest spice, and exhibits the most 

 capricious prices. Thus in 1590 it is bought for the Queen's 

 household at 6d. the ounce, or 6s. the pound. But in 1603 the 

 Archers give 3^. %d. for a single ounce, that is at the rate of 

 44s. the pound. It is probable that the great difficulty of 

 packing and preserving this fragile product may have made it 

 almost always dear, and may account for the variations in its 

 value. Mun imagines that the price should be the same as 

 that of cloves, but we shall see that to the consumer it is 

 much higher. The evidence indeed is very scanty. There is 

 none for the second decade, and the excessive price of 1603 is 

 misleading. But the rising price in the middle of the century, 

 more than double that in the fourth decade, and the great 

 price in the last, nearly treble that in the fourth, are indications 

 that the same influences which affected the price of nutmegs 



