er
white men in the world beside the Portuguese, had already led to
considerable results. Before the close of, the previous year that great
commercial corporation had been founded--an empire within an empire; a
republic beneath a republic--a counting-house company which was to
organize armies, conquer kingdoms, build forts and cities, make war and
peace, disseminate and exchange among the nations of the earth the
various products of civilization, more perfectly than any agency hitherto
known, and bring the farthest disjoined branches of the human family into
closer, connection than had ever existed before. That it was a monopoly,
offensive to true commercial principles, illiberal, unjust, tyrannical;
ignorant of the very rudiments of mercantile philosophy; is plain enough.
For the sages of the world were but as clowns, at that period, in
economic science.

Was not the great financier of the age; Maximilian de Bethune, at that
very moment exhausting his intellect in devices for the prevention of all
international commerce even in Europe? "The kingdom of France," he
groaned, "is stuffed full of the manufactures of our neighbours, and it
is incredible what a curse to us are these wares. The import of all
foreign goods has now been forbidden under very great penalties." As a
necessary corollary to this madhouse legislation an edict was issued,
prohibiting the export of gold and silver from France, on pain, not only
of confiscation of those precious metals, but of the whole fortune of
such as engaged in or winked at the traffic. The king took a public oath
never to exempt the culprits from the punishment thus imposed, and, as
the thrifty Sully had obtained from the great king a private grant of all
those confiscations, and as he judiciously promised twenty-five per cent.
thereof to the informer, no doubt he filled his own purse while
impoverishing the exchequer.

The United States, not enjoying the blessings, of a paternal government,
against which they had been fighting almost half a century, could not be
expected to rival the stupendous folly of such political economy,
although certainly not emancipated from all the delusions of the age.

Nor are we to forget how very recently, and even dimly, the idea of
freedom in commerce has dawned upon nations, the freest of all in polity
and religion. Certainly the vices and shortcomings of the commercial
system now inaugurated by the republic may be justly charged in great
part t