nsportation and travel become
difficult and hazardous. Merchant and customer, running alike a
labyrinthine gauntlet of taxes, tolls and arbitrary exactions by the
wolves of schloss and chateau, found it safest to make fewer trips and
concentrate their transactions. The great nations, with many secondary
trade-tournaments, as they may be termed, had each a principal one.
From the great fair of Leipsic, with the intellectual but very bulky
commodity of books for its specialty to-day, we pass to the two
Novgorods--one of them no more than a tradition, having been
annihilated by Peter the Great when, with the instinct of great rulers
for deep water, he located the new capital of his vast interior empire
on the only available harbor it possessed. Its successor, known from
its numerous namesakes by the designation of "New," draws convoys of
merchandise from a vast tributary belt bounded by the Arctic and
North Pacific oceans and the deserts of Khiva. This traffic exceeds
a hundred millions of dollars annually. The medley of tongues and
products due to the united contributions of Northern Siberia, China
and Turkestan is hardly to be paralleled elsewhere on the globe.
_Was_, insists the all-conquering railway as it moves inexorably
eastward, and relegates the New Novgorod, with its modern fairs,
to the stranded condition of the old one, with its traditional
expositions. As, however, the rail must have a terminus somewhere,
if only temporary, the caravans of camels, oxen, horses, boats and
sledges will converge to a movable entrepot that will assume more
and more an inter-Asiatic instead of an inter-national character. The
furs, fossil ivory, sheepskins and brick tea brought by them after
voyages often reaching a year and eighteen months, come, strictly
enough, under the head of raw products. Still, it is the best they
can bring; which cannot be said of what Europe offers in
exchange--articles mostly of the class and quality succinctly
described as "Brummagem." It is obvious that prizes, diplomas, medals,
commissioners and juries would be thrown away here. The palace
of glass and iron can only loom in the distant future, like the
cloud-castle in Cole's _Voyage of Life_. It may possibly be essayed in
a generation or two, when Ekaterinenborg, built up into a great
city by the copper, iron, gold, and, above all, the lately-opened
coal-mines of the Ural, shall have become the focus of the Yenisei,
Amour, Yang-tse and Indus system of