The Portuguese are entitled to the first place in utilizing the new sources of wealth and commerce. They obtained Macao as a settlement from the Chinese as early as 1537, and their trading operations followed close on the discoveries of their navigators on the coast of Africa, in India, and in the Indian Archipelago. Spain spread her dominion over Central and South America, and forced the labour of the subject natives into the gold and silver mines, which seemed in that age the chief prize of her conquests. France introduced her trade in both the East and West Indies, and was the first to colonize Canada and the Lower Mississippi. The Dutch founded New York in 1621; and England, which in boldness of naval and commercial enterprize had attained high rank in the reign of Elizabeth, established the thirteen colonies which became the United States, and otherwise had a full share in all the operations which were transforming the state of the world. The original disposition of affairs was destined to be much changed by the fortune of war; and success in foreign trade and colonization, indeed, called into play other qualities besides those of naval and military prowess. The products of so many new countries—tissues, dyes, metals, articles of food, chemical substances—greatly extended the range of European manufacture. But in addition to the mercantile faculty of discovering how they were to be exchanged and wrought into a profitable trade, their use in arts and manufactures required skill, invention, and aptitude for manufacturing labour, and these again, in many cases, were found to depend on abundant possession of natural materials, such as coal and iron. In old and populous countries, like India and China, modern manufacture had to meet and contend with ancient manufacture, and had at once to learn from and improve economically on the established models, before an opening could be made for its extension. In many parts of the New World there were vast tracts of country, without population or with native races too wild and savage to be reclaimed to habits of industry, whose resources could only be developed by the introduction of colonies of Europeans; and innumerable experiments disclosed great variety of qualification among the European nations for the adventure, hardship, and perseverance of colonial life. There were countries which, whatever their fertility of soil or favour of climate, produced nothing for which a market could be found; and products such as the sugar-cane and the seed of the cotton plant had to be carried from regions where they were indigenous to other regions where they might be successfully cultivated, and the art of planting had to pass through an ordeal of risk and speculation. There were also countries where no European could labour; and the ominous work of transporting African negroes as slaves into the colonies begun by Spain in the first decade of the 16th century, followed up by Portugal, and introduced by England in 1562 into the West Indies, at a later period into New England and the Southern States, and finally domiciled by royal privilege of trade in the Thames and three or more outports of the kingdom,—after being done on an elaborate scale, and made the basis of an immense superstructure of labour, property, and mercantile interest over nearly three centuries, had, under a more just and ennobling view of humanity, to be as elaborately undone at a future time. These are some of the difficulties that had to be encountered in utilizing the great maritime and geographical conquests of the new epoch. But one cannot leave out of view the obstacles, arising from other sources, to what might be dreamed to be the regular and easy course of affairs. Commerce, though an undying and prevailing interest of civilized countries, is but one of the forces acting on the policy of states, and has often to yield the pace to other elements of national life. It were needless to say what injury the great but vain and purposeless wars of Louis XIV. of France inflicted on that country, or how largely the fruitful and heroic energies of England were absorbed in the civil wars between Charles and the Parliament, to what poverty Scotland was reduced, or in what distraction and savagery Ireland was kept by the same course of events. The grandeur of Spain in the preceding century was due partly to the claim of her kings to be Holy Roman Emperors, in which imperial capacity they entailed intolerable mischief on the Low Countries and on the commercial civilization of Europe, and partly to their command of the gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru, in an eager lust of whose produce they brought cruel calamities on a newly-discovered continent where there were many traces of antique life, the records of which perished in their hands or under their feet. These ephemeral causes of greatness removed, the hollowness of the situation was exposed; and Spain, though rich in her own natural resources, was found to be actually poor—poor in number of people, poor in roads, in industrial art, and in all the primary conditions of interior development. An examination of the foreign trade of Europe two centuries after the opening of the maritime route to India and the discovery of America would probably give more reason to be surprised at the smallness than the magnitude of the use that had been made of these events.
- ↑ The imports and exports of Ireland at this period, and till the Union, formed a separate account, but the great bulk of them were in her trade with England and Scotland. In 1799 the imports of Ireland from all other ports than Great Britain were £1,263,595, and her exports £759,692; while her imports from Great Britain were £4,011,468, and her exports to Great Britain £4,891,161. Foreign markets were found for Irish manufactures through the British ports, and Ireland was supplied with foreign and colonial merchandize through the same channels. In 1771 the exports of British linen from England were 4,411,040 yards, and of Irish linen 3,450,224 yards. In the same year the exports of linen from Scotland included 701,012 yards of Irish manufacture.
