The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the Third Session Forty-Second Congress; An Appendix, Embracing the Laws Passed at That Session Page: 749
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1873.
THE CONGRESSIONAL GLOBE.
749
and political vassal of England, Mr. Maeaulay
declares:
"India was a much poorer country than countries
which in Europe aro reckoned poor; poorer than
Ireland, for example, than Portugal, or than
Sweden."
Should you push your researches back to
the dawn of history you learn the same lesson
resistlessly. Bactra, Babylon, and Bagdad,
as commercial centers, at that period, became
the centers and sources of the power and the
wealth of the nations. Phoenicia having no
other instrument of conquest than her " forces
of caravan and merchant fleet," and being
"the merest handful of men on the smallest
territory that ever claimed the dignity of an
independent State," became by those forces
"one of the wealthiest and most powerful
people in the world," so that her commercial
metropolis, perched at dizzy height upon a
bare rock surrounded by the sea, subjected to
her dominion Asia Minor, North Africa, Sicily,
Sardinia, Spain, the coasts beyond the " Pil-
lars of Hercules," the countries of Arabia,
India, and all the East.
With originally scarcely a namable product
at home, as the merchants and carriers of the
world she not only did what an inspired writer
declared of her when he said, "Thy wares
went forth out of the seas; thou filedst many
people; thou didst enrich the kings of the
earth with the multitude of thy riches and of
thy merchandise," but she was also the author
of the alphabet, and hence of written speech
and of the very germs of civilization.
The rise of cities and of States under the
direct influence of their control over and
receipt of commerce is precisely as familiar
as the history of cities and States. Baalbec,
Palmyra, Jerusalem, Petra of Edom, Athens,
the isthmus of Corinth, Phocaea, Massilia,
Ephesus, Smyrna, Byzantium,Olbia, Carthage.
Alexandria, and Rome, the supreme seats of
ancient commerce, each attest the truth of
the declaration of the English historian, that it
is the dominion over trade which " has made
princes of the camel-drivers of Babylon and
of the fishermen of Tyre; which has raised up
imperial cities on the hot sands of the African
sea shore, on the muddy refuse of the Po, and
on the quaking marshes of Holland, and made
London the capital of an empire extending to
the farthermost ends of the earth."
MODERN HISTORIC PROOl'S OF VALUE OP CAERYIXQ-
TRADE.
But, Mr. Speaker, still more convincing his-
toric proofs of the supreme values resulting
from this dominion over the instruments ot
trade crowd upon you from more modern
annals. On a dreary bank formed by the
soil which Alpine streams swept down to the
Adriatic, 011 a waste of wild sea-moor, where
the salt which incrusted the dry beds of the
lagoons and the fish which swam around them
were their only supplies, there a handful of
fugitives from the sword of the Hun reared
Venice; that Venice which became first the
originator of modern navigation, then the port,
for Italy and Germany, then the seat of the
Roman empire in the East, then the master
of the trade of France, Spain, Portugal, Eng-
land, Egypt, North Africa, and all Europe.
Then her empire penetrated Asia and the
empire of China and of the Indies. It poured
into her lap gold, diamonds, rubies, sapphires,
and all the treasures of the East. Then her
exquisite productions of glass, of brass, of
iron, and cloth-of-gold, her weapons, breast-
plates, helmets, and bucklers, beautified the
palaces, adorned the persons, and supplied the
armories of all the kings of the earth ; and her
ships carried to them all, her own rich produc-
tions. And, as this transformation and mir-
acle of commercial power gradually ascended
through the ages, mud "huts gave place to pal-
aces of marble and gold," and " peasants^vere
changed into haughty nobles," so that a single
city had of these at "least a thousand^ each ot
whose annual income would purchase from two
to thirty palaces; and her " Bank of Venice'
the first bank known to history—supplied the !
coffers of surrounding States; and the ships
of every flag paid her tribute at her quays.
And then, when her ships had made her mis-
tress of all navigated seas, and queen in all
civilized lands, then, in an hour, came the
event which turned her empire into ashes—an
event which, perhaps, as much as any in his-
tory, proclaims what I strive to impress upon
my countrymen, that dominion over trade is
the might and wealth of nations. That event
was the one which discovered the sea-way to
the Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, and
which thus wrested from Venice the lines and
depots of oriental commerce and gave these
to new empires which were to arise, in obedi-
ence to the same unvarying law, on the banks
of the Tagus.
Scarcely less convincing proofs of the power
and the wealth which ever go in the train of
commercial sway I must here pass by. These
are furnished in the history of Genoa—rival
of Venice—of Augsburg and her merchant
princes who levied tribute upon the products
of the civilized world. So in the history of
Marseilles, Montpelier, Lyons, and Tours,
whose merchantmen gave to France the treas-
ures used in the expulsion of England from
her territories. So of Florence, whose Cosmo
de Medici, and other owners of her ships,
loaned to England the treasures she exhausted
in " the war of the roses," and whose names,
Gibbon declares, are synonymous with the re-
vival of learning, and who brought to London
mingled cargoes of spices and Greek books.
So of the " Hanseatic League," a league em-
bracing in it not a king, not a government, and
organized solely to govern trade. This mere
commercial partnership, holding diets at
Lubeck, Cologne, and Brunswick, speedily
held in its sway the entire commerce of
Europe from the right bank of the Meuse to
the interior of Russia. Such was its wealth
and power that kings sought its alliance; em-
bassadors of England, France, Denmark, and
Germany were petitioners for its aid ; Den-
mark, Sweden, and Norway were defeated
by it in open and protracted wars : and entire
Scandinavia was compelled to acknowledge
its commercial supremacy. Mr. Speaker, to-
day, as I address you, the creations of that
prodigious commercial power, which domin-
ated the seas and land of north Europe i
throughout centuries are sending from Lubeck,
Hamburg, Bremen, and Frankfort lines of
steamships which control more of the foreign
trade of New York than is controlled by all
the ships uuder the flag of this Republic.
Take another example. Just when science
first put upon shipboard the mariner's com-
pass—that thing which the grateful mariner has
variously named "a beam from heaven," "a
seinory of earth and sky," "the seamen'snew
revelation from God," "the cynosure of all
seas," "the angel of the ship"—-just then a
little speck of land, scarce visible on the world's
map, outside the straits of Gibraltar, cut off :
from the Mediterranean and all navigated seas j
save the unknown ocean, cutoff from material l
influence or power on the continent by its fee- j
bleness, isolation, and territorial insignifi- j
cance—just then that, mereanimalcule among ;
the nations, Portugal, commenced a search |
for the oceau-road to Asia beyond Cape Non j
and beyond that unknown Africa, where the !
maps then showed ouly dragons, serpents, j
and all manner of strange monsters. With a ;
courage nearly sublime, that search was main- i
tained for near a century before crowned with
success, which came when Vasco de Gama, j
in 1497, passed the Cape of Good Hope and ;
went to India by the sea. _ f
What followed was another of those miracles '
wrought by the wand of commerce, which ;
lie all along the pathway of history. In less
than twenty years after De Gama passed the '
Cape of Storms (as he called Good Hope) the .
entire commerce of the East and the domm- |
ion of its coast from Ormuz to the Moluccas i
was in the ownership of Portugal, and in half
a century their dominion, either commercial,
territorial, or both, included India, Ceylon,
Sumatra, Java, the coast of Persia, and all the
islands of its gulf, parts of Arabia, China,
Japan, the coast and shore islands of Africa,
and an immense proportion of South America.
Her colonies speedily circled the globe. Gold,
silver, gems, silks, spices, and every other lux-
ury and splendor was poured by her commerce
into the lap of the tiny State until she attained
a magnificence of wealth and power which Mr.
Goodrich declares " seemed to realize the ex-
travagance of fiction and gave the world a
memorable example of the superlative power
of commerce."
And then, when this pitiful point of arid
land, where their kings planted pines that they
might grow into ships, had held mastery of the
seas for near a century, and outranked in
wealth of colonies, of commerce, and of mili-
tary power the nations of the globe, then the
scepter of her power on the seas was wrested
from her by England, Spain, and the Dutch,
and instantly she sank to an unnoticed quan-
tity in the affairs of nations, and the story of
the profoundness of her fall is sadly told in a
single sentence from late statistical reports of
her first conqueror and last protector, England,
which says:
" Since 1867 no annual returns in relation to Por-
tugese commerce have been published."
I now pass over the familiar example of
Spain, whose commercial enterprise gave the
map of the world a new continent, and I next
point you to a prodigy which arose "like an
exhalation" out of the sea, at the touch of
that same wizard wand whose miracles we
have told.
This nation had its strange but fit motto
"Luctor et JEmergo." Of its home, Maeaulay
and others say " it was a desolate marsh over-
hung by fogs, exhaling diseases—had neither
firm earth nor drinkable water—a marsh from
which the ocean on one side and the Rhine
on the other were with difficulty kept out by
embankment—a republic lying under the level
of the ocean at high tides, and kept from
drowning by innumerable pumps driven by
wiud-mills," with scarce a product except a
little fish which other nations throw away.
Right here it was that commerce decided again
to locate the seat of her marvelous power, and
here arose quickly "the most powerful and
prosperous community in Europe," a commer-
cial republic, the home monuments of whose
greatness were, successively, Antwerp, where
two thousand ships appeared each day of the
year; Amsterdam, whose merchant vessels
Sir Walter Raleigh declared outnumbered
all England's, and ten other kingdoms put
together, and was "the center of the commerce
of Europe;" and the eye, from its ramparts,
could not penetrate the forest of its masts.
Some hint of the value of this example of the
effects upoii national prosperity of owning the
machinery of commerce may be got from
statements like the following from historians
of her great commercial rival, England. One
historian says:
" The Batavian territory, conquered from the
waves and defended against them by human art,
was, in extent, little superior to the principality of
Wales. But all that space was a busy, populous
hive, in which new wealth was every day created,
and in which vast masses of old wealth were hoarded.
The aspect of Holland, the rich cultivation, the in-
numerable canals, the ever-whirling mills, the end-
less fleet of barges, the quick succession of great
towns, the ports bristling with thousands of masts,
the large and stately mansions, the trim villas, the
riohlv-lurnisiied apartments, the picture-galleries,
the summer houses, the tulip beds, produced on
English travelers in that age an effect similar to the
effect which the first sight of England produces on
a Norwegian or Canadian."
And of its vastuess of wealth and power,
another English historian declares that—
" Step by step it extended its dominions through-
out the world, girdling the world with its depend-
encies, exercising sovereignty inHindostan, Ceylon,
Java, Sumatra, Sew Holland, Uuinea, the West
Indies, Braril, and New York."
And to-day, diminished in relative great-
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United States. Congress. The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the Third Session Forty-Second Congress; An Appendix, Embracing the Laws Passed at That Session, book, 1873; Washington D.C.. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc30903/m1/81/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.