Italy. Syria
had long become a desert, and the ruined palaces were become the
habitations of scorpions, reptiles, and beasts of prey, long before those
discoveries which seemed to have sealed their doom. That discovery
only completed what had long been begun, and rendered permanent
and irrevocable what might otherwise have been altered. {58}

At the rate at which this trade now goes on to increase, all the gold
and silver mines in the West, will soon be insufficient to afford
enough of the precious metals to pay for produce from that country:
for few European manufactures are taken in return. This is laying a
foundation for a great revolution, either in manners or in nations at
some future day.

It is extraordinary that, from the earliest ages, the inhabitants of India
have been receiving gold and silver from all other countries, and yet,
that those metals are not so abundant there as with European nations.
As our demand for the produce of the mines increases in order to send
remittances in specie to that country, the mines themselves diminish in
their produce, so that whatever change this may bring on, can be at no
very great distance. {59}

---
{58} What Dr. Robertson says of Palmyra may be applied nearly to all
the cities in Asia and Africa that shared in this commerce. "Palmyra,
after the conquest by Aurelian never revived." At present, a few
miserable huts of beggarly Arabs are scattered in the courts of its
stately temples, or deform its elegant porticoes, and exhibit a
humiliating contrast to its ancient magnificence.

{59} If the taste of the Anglo Americans for tea continues, allowing
one pound to each person in the year, which is very little, one hundred
millions of pounds weight will be annually wanted in less than half a
century.
-=-

[end of page #61]

CHAP. VII.

_Of the Causes that brought on the Decline of the Nations that had
flourished in the middle Ages, and of Portugal, Spain, Holland, and
the Hans Towns_.

The trade with India, which had been almost the only one, and
always an occasion for envy and contest, was sought for by the
Spaniards and the Portuguese; who, as we have seen, were the first
amongst modern nations that seemed to aspire at naval discovery.

The manner in which Spain discovered America; and Portugal, the
passage by the Cape of Good Hope, both nearly at the same period,
and at the beginning of the sixteenth century, is too well known to
require the smallest d