In ordinary cases, the discarded population are thrown
back on the agricultural basis, which upheld them be-
fore, and which is broad enough, and solid enough, to
iqdiold them still. But in this case, a population, dis-
MTered from their maintenance, are thrown adrift on
tile wide world ; and, with their dispersion, there is a



FOREIGN TRADE. 165

corresponding decline of national strength and national
greatness. There is all the difference in the world be-
tween that commerce, the annihilation of which would
but involve the loss, or rather the change, of luxuries,
and that commerce, the annihilation of which would
in vol ye the loss of the first necessaries of existence. In
the latter circumstances of a country, we are not to
wonder at the commercial jealousies which have actu-
ated its governments. To be undersold by neighbours,
were to them a death-warrant, involving, as it does,
their exclusion from those markets whence they fetch
the very aliment of their being. This accounts well
for the fragility and the precarious existence of all such
states— of Tyre, and Carthage, and Venice, and the
Hanseatic towns of Germany, which pass before us in
splendid, but ephemeral succession, as we contemplate
the history of past ages. When deserted by their
trade, the very foundation on which they rested gave
way under them ; they having no such foundation in
any territory of their own. They, in fact, became as
helpless as any inland town of home shops or manufac-
tures, when deserted by its country custon^ers. This
Aa enough to account for the speed and splendour of
many a mushroom elevation — for the speed of many a
helpless and irrecoverable fall — for the decay of com-
merce in smaller states — and the utter destruction of its
isolated cities. Hence the desolation of Tyre, and
hence the departed glory from the north of Italy.
