Page:Great Britain and the Suez Canal.djvu/13

 specially benefited the commercial interests of England as compared with other nations. On the contrary, it has favoured those nations at our expense, and the freedom of the Canal means more to them than it does to us.

It would be most unfair, however, to attribute exclusively to the Suez Canal the disappearance of so many intermediate agencies between the Indian producer and the European consumer. At the present day there is in all trades a tendency to bring the producer and the consumer into more immediate connection. But what the Suez Canal has done is to stimulate and accelerate this tendency, and to transfer the remaining agency between producer and consumer from England, once the centre and depôt of the commerce between Asia and Europe, to the ports and cities of the Mediterranean.

A short historical retrospect will place this matter in a clearer light, and may serve to show that the changes in commerce which have followed upon the opening of the Suez Canal are not accidental or irregular, but are rather the first effects of causes which will operate in the future constantly and with accumulated force.

The opening of the Suez Canal has exactly reversed what took place when the route round the Cape of Good Hope was substituted for the overland routes between Europe and the East. These overland routes in the fourteenth century seem to have been principally three. One of these routes passed through Egypt; another ran through Bagdad and Tabreez to the ports of Antioch and Seleucia; whilst the third traversed the highlands of Armenia and terminated at Trebizond. Western Asia, although it had declined from its former prosperity, was still rich, populous, and fairly well cultivated. Alexandria was then, what it has become once more, a great emporium of Oriental merchandise, and Constantinople was not inferior to Alexandria. From the ports of Egypt and Asia Minor that merchandise passed over to the West in the ships of Yenice and Genoa. From those cities it was distributed through the Alpine passes to the Free Cities of Southern Germany and the Rhine. In bulk, variety, and value, it was insignificant indeed compared with the cargoes that now pass through the Suez Canal. Yet how many German and Italian cities owed to this toilsome Oriental traffic their wealth and magnificence? Professor Thorold Rogers brings this out clearly in his most interesting book on the History of Agriculture and Prices in England. He says: "In the fifteenth century such towns