them in boats. The next step was to establish a warehouse on shore. In the early days of Australia sea captains brought out adventure cargoes, and on the second or third trip they landed their merchandise and sold it in shops which they built or hired. Just in this way we imagine the bold navigators of Phœnicia and Carthage to have traversed the Mediterranean, and, carrying their own wares to distant parts, received in exchange the products of foreign countries. As the trade grew, they left agents in charge of their warehouses who became the nucleus of a colony, as to-day Greeks or Germans settle in Liverpool or Adelaide and form a quasi-colony. The coasts of Sicily, Italy, and Greece, Africa and Spain, Gaul and Britain were thus dotted with commercial establishments, The Tyrian settlements are said not to have advanced beyond the stage of factories; yet Cadiz, the oldest city in western Europe, is of Tyrian foundation. The Carthaginians aimed at conquest as well as trade, welded some three hundred communities into an empire, maintained an army in Iberia, and fought for supremacy with the future mistress of the world. Yet neither were their settlements always colonies, and when the Greeks threatened to supplant them in Sicily they abandoned their outposts and concentrated themselves in a few principal points. The colonies of the most intellectual nation in the world were, nine tenths of them, commercial in their origin; the ancient Greeks were "a nation of shopkeepers." They unscrupulously seized an island adjoining the mainland, an isthmus or headland that could be easily fortified and defended, and there established a seaport, commanding a monopoly of trade with the natives. The Ionian settlements on the coast of Asia Minor answered to this description, and most of them had this origin. The coasts of Thrace, the Propontis, and the Black Sea were dotted with such merchant colonies. Calabria and Sicily were almost Hellenized. In far-away Marseilles and at the mouth of the Rhône were laid the foundations of two great mercantile cities. After the conquest of Britain a stream of Roman merchants and artisans poured themselves over the new field, and a number of towns—London, Bath, St. Albans—were formed as "the new result of freedom of traffic and immigration." The whole ancient world, which we think of as devoted to war and conquest, addicted to religious rites, absorbed in political struggles, or producing and enjoying immortal works of literature and art, had its existence based on industry and commerce, as the existence of the individual is based on hunger.
The modern world has been built up on the same foundation; The Venetians continued the eastern trade of the Roman Empire, and everywhere in the Levant left colonies. Portugal and Spain, with their ports opening on the Atlantic and inviting to discovery.
