Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/225

 of corn they always so much needed, but obtained a monopoly of nearly all the trade between India and Europe. Though affording a vast source of wealth to those engaged in it, the trade with India was unpopular with the bulk of the Roman people, who saw a few individuals enriched by its incredible profits, while the country was drained of specie to pay for every conceivable article of luxury. The raw materials which alone could afford remunerative employment to the Roman manufacturers were too costly in their transit to constitute, as they do now, the chief articles of import; and the natives of India and of Arabia were so well satisfied with the productions and manufactures of their own territories, that silver was almost the only article they would receive in exchange from the Romans. Pliny computed the annual loss arising from these exchanges at eight hundred thousand pounds sterling; and Gibbon has noticed that a pound of silk was at one period esteemed of the same value as a pound of gold.

But though it is a mistake to suppose that in the ordinary course of commerce, the export of the precious metals entails a loss when exchanged for produce and manufactures, Pliny had some reason to dread the results, while the industrious citizens had ample cause for complaint when they saw the whole wealth of the empire exchanged for pearls, precious stones, or costly aromatics required only for the funeral pageants of a few wealthy citizens. Nor is it hard to understand the accumulation of great riches about this period at Rome, when we reflect on the number of valuable provinces over which its rulers