rcial power of that rich
city, which an ambassador of Venice in the fifteenth century had
compared to Venice herself. They received besides in their
principal cities the workingmen of the Low Countries who fled
from Spanish tyranny of conscience. The manufactures of clothes,
linen stuffs, etc., which employed six hundred thousand souls,
opened new sources of gain to a people previously content with
the trade in cheese and fish. Fisheries alone had already
enriched them. The herring fishery supported nearly one fifth of
the population of Holland, producing three hundred thousand tons
of salt-fish, and bringing in more than eight million francs
annually.

"The naval and commercial power of the republic developed
rapidly. The merchant fleet of Holland alone numbered 10,000
sail, 168,000 seamen, and supported 260,000 inhabitants. She had
taken possession of the greater part of the European
carrying-trade, and had added thereto, since the peace, all the
carriage of merchandise between America and Spain, did the same
service for the French ports, and maintained an importation
traffic of thirty-six million francs. The north countries,
Brandenburg, Denmark, Sweden, Muscovy, Poland, access to which
was opened by the Baltic to the Provinces, were for them an
inexhaustible market of exchange. They fed it by the produce
they sold there, and by purchase of the products of the
North,--wheat, timber, copper, hemp, and furs. The total value
of merchandise yearly shipped in Dutch bottoms, in all seas,
exceeded a thousand million francs. The Dutch had made
themselves, to use a contemporary phrase, the wagoners of all
seas."[18]

It was through its colonies that the republic had been able thus to
develop its sea trade. It had the monopoly of all the products of the
East. Produce and spices from Asia were by her brought to Europe of a
yearly value of sixteen million francs. The powerful East India
Company, founded in 1602, had built up in Asia an empire, with
possessions taken from the Portuguese. Mistress in 1650 of the Cape of
Good Hope, which guaranteed it a stopping-place for its ships, it
reigned as a sovereign in Ceylon, and upon the coasts of Malabar and
Coromandel. It had made Batavia its seat of government, and extended
its traffic to China and Japan. Meanwhile the West India Company, of
more rapid rise, but less dur