titutions clung to with fiercest tenacity fell away. Barbaric
independence had followed Greek and Roman slavery, which in turn was
succeeded by feudal servitude, to reappear once more in the
affranchised communes. Each experiment had its season, and sunk into the
darkness of the past, to give place to a new one, which must transmit to
posterity the principal and interest of all preceding ones. But though
progress when taken in the mass is plain, the individual years in each
generation show small trace of it. Even as late as the sixteenth
century, the workman fared little better than the brutes. Erasmus tells
us that their houses had no chimneys, and their floors were bare ground;
while Fortescue, who travelled in France at the same time, reports a
misery and degradation which have had vivid portraiture in Taine's
"Ancien Regime."

A flood of wealth poured in on the discovery of the New World. The
invention of gunpowder put a new face upon warfare, and that of printing
made possible the cheap and wide dissemination of long-smouldering
ideas. Economic problems perplexed every country, and on all sides
methods of solving them were put in action. Sully, who found in Henry
IV. of France an ardent supporter of his wishes for her prosperity, had
altered and systematized taxes, and introduced a multitude of reforms in
general administration; and later, Colbert did even more notable work.
The Italian Republics had made their noble code of commercial rules and
maxims. The Dutch had given to the world one of the most wonderful
examples of what man may accomplish by sheer pluck and persistent hard
work, and commercial institutions founded on a principle of liberty; and
neither the terror of the Spanish rule nor the jealousy of England had
destroyed her power. Credit, banking, all modern forms of exchange were
coming into use; and agriculture, which the feudal system had kept in a
state of torpor, awakened and became a productive power.

Side by side with this were gigantic speculations, like that of John Law
and the East India Company, with the helpless ruin of its collapse. The
time was ripe for the formulation of some system of economic laws; and
two men who had long pondered them, De Gournay and Quesnay, made the
first attempt to explain the meaning of wealth and its distribution.
After Quesnay and his system, still holding honorable place, came
Turgot; after Turgot, Adam Smith; and thenceforward halt is impossible,
and economi