168 
THE HISTORY OF COMMERCE. 
Eor thousands of years commerce has spread its blessings over many 
countries ; imperceptible are its beneficent influences on civilisation, 
nations, and their development ; it has brought into advantageous union 
countries and peoples, founded cities and states, softened men's manners, 
and conducted them to wealth and education. Commerce has ever been 
the motive, awakening in every direction life and useful activity, ani- 
mating production and industry, and stimulating each art to unwearied 
activity and strife after new discoveries. Without such emulation many 
discoveries important in their action would never have been made, 
and distant regions of the earth would have yet remained unknown and 
uncultivated. 
Happy therefore the country where commerce establishes herself. 
The history of all times gives proofs that States where commerce 
enters with her attendants, trade, agriculture and mining, quickly raise 
themselves high above their contemporaries. So shines yet through 
past ages Phoenicia with her Tyre and Sidon, rich through navigation 
and industry, and still later the celebrated Carthage, whose opulence 
and power on the Mediterranean had the same foundation. So rose 
after them Italy by her great commerce, of which she might well 
be proud, and Venice and Genoa under the Medici, whose splendours and 
power have not even yet disappeared. Later still, Great Britain and 
Holland through commerce have obtained the dominion of the seas and 
the government of foreign countries ; and so by the same stirring com- 
mercial activity has arisen a state in the New "World, the free Union in 
North America, which in a wonderfully short time has become a 
powerful rival in the commercial world, and attained to political 
importance. 
But commerce and industry were not always so flourishing and exten- 
sive in the circle of their operations as at present, because not any period 
of time is so marked as our nineteenth century in varied intellectual 
development and rapid and common advance in different departments of 
human knowledge. As it was not always the same country which shone 
in this respect, it will be interesting to point out in a short sketch 
the most important phases of commercial life from ancient to recent 
times. 
All commercial intercourse could in the beginning have no other origin 
than that which we find at the present time among people in the lowest 
stage of civilisation — viz., an interchange of the raw products of nature ; 
from a want of them on the one side, and an overflow of them on the 
other. The increase of mankind and their need to buy and sell at cer- 
tain prices, or by some common medium of barter, must first have led 
them to settle upon the precious metals or money. 
In the East, to whose earliest development as well as to her precious 
