PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 559 
aware whether India ever was in historical times a wealthy country in the sense 
of producing a great abundance of the necessaries and ordinary conveniences and 
comforts of life in proportion to the population, but if it was not rich itself it 
was at least the means of making others rich. There can hardly be a doubt that 
the desire of possessing this country of real or imagined wealth was prominent 
among the motives that led Alexander the Great to embark on that enterprise 
which had such surprisingly—one might almost say miraculously—widespread, 
profound, and lasting effects on the history of the Near East. If we may accept 
as historical the speech in which Quintus Curtius represents Alexander as having 
addressed his troops after his victory over Porus, in order to encourage them to 
advance further into India, that speech affords fairly strong evidence of what has 
just been stated. ‘ What now remained for them,’ said Alexander, ‘ was a noble 
spoil. The much-rumoured riches of the East abounded in those very regions to 
which their steps were now bent. The spoils accordingly which they had taken from 
the Persians had now become cheap and common. ‘They were going to fill with 
pearls, precious stones, gold, and ivory not only their private abodes, but all 
Macedonia and Greece.’! Alexander was no merchant. Pepper was beneath his 
notice. His symbols of wealth are those which have always most powerfully 
affected the imagination. Later on, however, we shall meet with a king who 
was a merchant, and who understood perhaps better than Alexander wherein 
consisted the value of Indian trade. 
At the outset of his career Alexander had destroyed Tyre, thinking, no doubt, 
that he had thereby wiped away the claims of one rival for a share of the wealth 
of the East ; but it isa noteworthy fact that he did not thereby destroy the value of 
the site of Tyre under the conditions which then subsisted. Tyre revived and again 
obtained wealth from its trade with the East, as it did againand again in subse- 
quent history. A heavier blow to Tyre than its mere destruction was the ultimate 
accomplishment of Alexander's idea for founding a great seat of commerce on the 
harbour which he saw could be created in the neighbourhood of the Nile delta. 
The foundation of Alexandria and the successful efforts of the successors of 
Alexander in Egypt to divert a large part of the trade in spices and other Oriental 
goods to the Red Sea route for the Mediterranean did more than a single act of 
war to deprive Tyre and other Pheenician cities of the peculiar pre-eminence 
which they had long enjoyed in the trade in those wealth-bringing commodities. 
But perhaps the history of Venice shows even more clearly than that of Tyre 
the importance of this eastern trade in connection with certain inevitable 
geographical relations. The foundation of the future commercial glory of Venice 
may be said to have been laid when Rome planted her colonies north of the 
Po. The gradual clearing of forests gained for agriculture to a greater and 
greater extent one of the most favoured agricultural areas in Europe. There 
resulted a superfluity of agricultural products, which begot a trade by sea. The 
great outlet of this plain in Roman times was Aquileia, which in the beginning o 
the fifth century, when no one of discernment could imagine that there would ever 
be other than Roman times, was described by a Roman man of affairs and minor 
poet as one of the nine great cities of the world. But before that century was 
out Aquileia was destroyed, never to recover. The value of its site was replaced, 
and that in a strange way, which no man of discernment could ever have fore- 
seen. The time that saw the destruction of Aquileia and the times that imme- 
diately followed were such as made safety a prime consideration, and especially 
for all who possessed or desired to possess wealth. Refugees from Aquileia, and 
afterwards from other Italian cities, thought at first of nothing but safety. 
Many of them found it on a few muddy and sandy islands near the muddy 
shores of the lagoon in which Venice now lies. But here they found the 
means of trade. The sea could be made to furnish both fish and salt, and 
the rivers that flowed into the lagoon enabled them to exchange these com- 
modities for provisions of other kinds which the adjoining land could supply. 
1 J. W. M‘Crindle, The Invasion of India by Alewander the Great (1893), p. 215. 
