Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/230

202 yet full of, and capable in a high degree of an. offered less resistance to the action of than, , and ; but on the other hand this new populous Eastern world held out much attraction to. These two great terrestrial discoveries were contemporaneous; and it would be difficult to name any conjuncture of material events bearing so importantly on the of the. The was the medium of both; and the s of the  beat into all the s and  s of. The centre of commercial activity was thus physically changed; and the formative power of over  affairs was seen in the subsequent phenomena,—the rise of great s on the , and the ceaseless activity of  exploration, s, , and , of which they became the outlets.

The are entitled to the first place in utilizing the new sources of wealth and commerce. They obtained as a settlement from the  as early as 1537, and their  followed close on the discoveries of their  on the  of, in, and in the. spread her dominion over and, and forced the labour of the subject  into the  and  , which seemed  the chief prize of her conquests. introduced her in both the  and, and was the first to   and the. The founded  in 1621; and, which in boldness of  and commercial enterprize had attained high rank in the reign of , established the  which became the , and otherwise had a full share in all the operations which were transforming the state of the. The original disposition of affairs was destined to be much changed by the fortune of ; and success in foreign and, indeed, called into play other qualities besides those of  and  prowess. The products of so many new —s,, s, articles of , —greatly extended the range of an. But in addition to the mercantile faculty of discovering how they were to be exchanged and wrought into a profitable, their use in and  required skill, , and aptitude for  , and these again, in many cases, were found to depend on abundant possession of , such as  and. In old and populous, like and , modern  had to meet and contend with ancient , and had at once to learn from and improve  on the established models, before an opening could be made for its extension. In many parts of the there were vast tracts of, without population or with   too wild and savage to be reclaimed to habits of , whose  could only be developed by the introduction of  of ans; and innumerable s disclosed great variety of qualification among the an s for the adventure, hardship, and perseverance of  life. There were which, whatever their  of  or favour of, produced nothing for which a  could be found; and products such as the  and the  of the  had to be carried from regions where they were indigenous to other regions where they might be successfully , and the art of planting had to pass through an ordeal of  and. There were also where no  could ; and the ominous work of transporting n es as  into the  begun by  in the first decade of the 16th century, followed up by, and introduced by  in 1562 into the , at a later period into  and the , and finally domiciled by   in the  and three or more out of the ,—after being done on an elaborate scale, and made the basis of an immense superstructure of , , and  over nearly three centuries, had, under a more  and  view of , to be as elaborately undone at a future time. These are some of the difficulties that had to be encountered in utilizing the great and  conquests of. But one cannot leave out of view the obstacles, arising from other sources, to what might be dreamed to be the regular and easy course of affairs. Commerce, though an undying and prevailing interest of, is but one of the forces acting on the policy of , and has often to yield the pace to other elements of al life. It were needless to say what injury the great but vain and purposeless s of of  inflicted on, or how largely the ful and ic energies of  were absorbed in the civil wars between  and the , to what   was reduced, or in what distraction and savagery  was kept by the same course of events. The grandeur of in the preceding century was due partly to the claim of her s to be s, in which  capacity they entailed intolerable mischief on the  and on the commercial  of, and partly to their command of the  and   of  and , in an eager lust of whose produce they brought cruel calamities on a  where there were many traces of antique life, the  of which perished in their  or under their. These ephemeral causes of greatness removed, the hollowness of the situation was exposed; and, though rich in , was found to be actually poor—poor in , poor in s, in , and in all the primary conditions of interior development. An examination of the foreign of  two centuries after the opening of the   to  and the discovery of  would probably give more reason to be surprised at the smallness than the magnitude of the use that had been made of these events. Mr David Macpherson, who published his elaborate Annals of Commerce in 1805, states that in 1764 the total imports of amounted in official value to 11,250,660, and the total exports to 17,446,306. He found from the  that in 1800 the imports had increased to 30,570,004, and the exports to 43,152,019, which he deemed an encouraging amount of progress, as, in view of the events, then deemed peculiarly disastrous, that had occurred in the interval  of the, the , and the s of —it may, no doubt, be held to be. Of the exports in 1800 24,304,283 were, and 18,847,735 foreign and. The proportion of the latter shows to what extent had become the medium of  between  and the  and ; but as these re-exports must be deducted from the total imports, there is left only 11,722,269 of imports to 