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the furs of Scandinavia and the tin of Britain. Thus 

 Alexandria, planted by the Conqueror at the mouth of 

 the Nile, controlled, under the Ptolemies, the trade of 

 Africa. ' Thus Babylon under Alexander, and Palmyra 

 under Solomon, both inland cities, but planted in the 

 highway of Asiatic commerce, rose to the chief place 

 among nations and again declined under the enervating 

 influences of wealth and conquest. 



The causes of commercial greatness operative among 

 the ancients, continued to operate during the middle agesj 

 and produced, in turn, the Italian Eepublics. Venice, 

 Genoa, Florence, Pisa, 'held the carrying trade of the 

 East, until the end of the fifteenth century, at which 

 period they had introduced Public Banking, Book- 

 keeping by double entry, Bills of Exchange, and a 

 system of Funded Debt, and the coins of Venice circu- 

 lated from Iceland to Cathay. Two momentous events 

 signalized the close of the fifteenth century. Spain had 

 found her way to America in search of a new path to 

 India,. Portugal had found a new path to India by doub- 

 ling the African Cape. From this date the Mediterra- 

 nean pol'ts sunk in importance, and the vigorous peoples 

 of northern Europe grasped their share of Eastern traffic, 

 by following the Portuguese pioneers around the Cape of 

 Good Hope. During the sixteenth and seventeen cen- 

 turies the Dutch were carriers for the rest of Europe, and 

 the English superseded them in the eighteenth. And 

 now the ambitious formula of Sir Walter Ealeigh was by 

 no means forgotten. In 1787 Sir John Dalrymple, un- 

 easy that Spain should hold, still more uneasy lest the 

 United States might thereafter hold the Isthmus of 

 Darien, wrote thus on the subject in a work whose signifi- 

 cant motto was : 



Regique hoc dicite vestro, 

 Non illi imperium pelagi I 



