times further than to remark how the taste for romantic fiction has revived in our own time. The great twin brethren of fiction who filled the central space of the century-I mean Dickens and Thackeray-by the power of their description and analysis, by the point and splendour of their humour and satire, made us all in love with the novels of every day life; and romantic though these were in one sense, the more imaginative fields of fiction were deserted. Again the pendulum of public taste appears to have swung back into the wonderland through which we are led by a Rider Haggard or a Stevenson. It is well that taste changes. It is well that human effort varies. It is well, too, above all, that the race still has force, and simplicity, and freshness enough to cling to its young delights. No one need greatly fear for the future of a man or of a nation that will stop to listen to a good romance.

ग्र

TRADE AND COMMERCE IN ANCIENT

TIMES

HE subject of trade and commerce in our own day is one of vast importance, as it is a subject that affects vitally the interests of a very large proportion of mankind directly, and all mankind more or less indirectly. Apart from individual gains or losses, which are really immaterial to the grand questions of national prosperity and progress, or of national decadence, the course of commercial activity is, in the main, a very fair criterion of human welfare, and the study of its fluctuations from a sufficiently broad standpoint is one that cannot fail to interest those even who are unfitted for its active prosecution, and uninitiated in the somewhat intricate mysteries of daily toil in the markets of the world. I certainly should not think myself justified in dealing with any of those great questions which are at present agitating the world of trade and commerce. My object is a different one. It is to bring to the mind's eye some sort of picture of what the beginnings of trade and commerce were, so far as we can ascertain them, and what was the course of their development among those great nations of

119

antiquity to whom in this, as in so many other departments of human activity, we owe so much. This subject of commerce in the ancient world has not, so far as I am aware, been treated at any great length, nor has it won for itself any great prominence, at least in our literature. There is one very valuable work on the subject to which I may often refer-Mr. Lindsay's "History of Merchant Shipping and Ancient Commerce -which treats of my subject in a very full and, at the same time, most interesting and engaging manner; and although that author's object of study is mainly that of maritime commercial activity, he gives a clear and wide conspectus of the whole field of ancient commerce, which reads almost like a romance, and renders his work a leading authority in English literature on the whole subject. Much light is thrown on it also by such works as M. Laurent's "Etudes sur l'Histoire de l'Humanité," M. Pardessus' "Cours de droit Commercial," and his great collection of maritime codes; not to speak of the works of German scholars such as Heeren's "Africa." It is, however, when we endeavour to make some researches in the field of general literature that the chief interest of the enquiry arises, for we then find that the Holy Scriptures themselves, the great poems of Homer, the whole literature of Greece and of Rome, are full of casual references to a department of human action which, having no voice of its own, and lacking the terrible public fascinations of war and conquest, might otherwise be lost to us altogether. The silent victories of peace are not proclaimed aloud by poet and historian, but their fruits are so interwoven with daily life, their

results so sensible and tangible on every hand, that they tell their own story on the chroniclers' unconscious page, and are heard as undertones even in the songs of the epic muse.

The phrase "ancient times" is a very vague one. The difficulty of estimating lapses of time increases as the periods lie further from our own day, and we are too apt to look upon events separated from each other by periods equal to our whole national history, as if they were contemporaneous. It is impossible to shake ourselves free from this intellectual error; it is sufficient to mention it, in order that you may at least make the effort to appreciate the vast periods of which I must now speak.

It is generally supposed that, in ages of giddy remoteness from our present life, the grassy steppes which lie to the west of northern India were peopled by races whose destiny could not have been foretold from their then condition of pastoral nomadism. A grand people in every sense these were, leading out to their illimitable pastures the flocks they had intellect to tame and domesticate, clothed in garments woven by their own skill, fashioning implements of iron, cooking their food before eating it, and, latterly, stirred through all their spreading families by the instinct that led them to broaden over the young world that was waiting in the glooms of barbarism for the brightening influence of their presence. When the vague wish to wander had become a fixed purpose, the central home was broken up, and two human streams began to flow eastward and westward respectively. That to the east, while sending

a subsidiary branch into Persia, entered India somewhere about the Kaibar Pass, and slowly moved into the Punjaub and down to the Ganges and Jumna and along the southern slopes of the Himalayas. Here were composed the hymns of the Rig-Veda, and in them we have evidence of how greatly the social life of man had developed itself. Although the intervals of time are dimly distinguished and difficult to apprehend, there is no doubt that the singers of the Vedic hymns lived in the midst of a society which was very different from the state of things on the grass-plains of the north, from which they had wandered so far.

We must now turn to the multitudes which moved in successive waves to the westward. Of these it may be premised that though their divisions were many, and their movements at first very vague, we are quite justified in speaking of them as our remote progenitors. For the goal of their wanderings was Europe, and that goal they in due time reached.

Unfortunately for any pretensions which this great family of the human race may put forth to superior antiquity, or rather to earlier respectability, there can be little doubt that they were not the first to become in any appreciable degree civilized. For in their path from central Asia to Europe, there lay two river valleys in whose rich levels men had probably already built cities and palaces, had already become great in war, and conspicuous in the arts of peace.

If we suppose Babylon to have been founded on the Euphrates somewhere about 2500 B.C., the result doubtless of civilization and empire, as well as the