centres for home consumption.  At the beginning of the fifteenth century the capricious fish suddenly took another direction, visiting the coast of Holland, to the people of which he thenceforth became as lucrative a source of revenue as he had been to the Hanses.  It has been said that Amsterdam with all its wealth is built upon herrings; and a similar statement could once be applied with equal justice to the Hansa cities of the Baltic.

Concerning the characteristic methods of conducting trade it may be well here to add that during the distant period here under consideration a so-called commission business could scarcely be said to exist; and this is true also of speculation in the narrower sense.  While buying and selling on time were not infrequent, especially in the grain market, the transactions were upon an infinitely smaller scale than as conducted at present, when, as the saying goes, “goods is sold a dozen times before it is actually available.”  The unsound methods at present in vogue, based as they are upon fluctuations in price, were then scarcely known.  “Goods in exchange for goods or its equivalent in money” was the motto of the Hanseatic merchant, who, however, was by no means always entirely guiltless of fraudulent operations.  Often enough the lowermost layers of herring in the keg consisted of spoiled goods, and not infrequently a bale of linen had to be returned from station to station to the place whence it was sent in order that it might be reexamined as to quantity and quality.  In these transactions the crafty dealer usually preferred to take advantage of the proverbial simplicity of the Norwegian.

The scope of the Hansa trade was greater than one would imagine.  It was greater, for example, than that of the maritime towns of Germany for the period immediately preceding the era of steam navigation, i.e., about 1830.  The fish trade was at that early period far more brisk, partly because the herring then visited the shores of the Baltic, and partly because the church laws relative to abstinence from meat during the fasts were rigidly observed by all the states of Christian Europe.  A few figures will serve vividly to illustrate this change:  In 1855, 3,700 kegs of herring were imported by way of Lubeck, as against 33,000 kegs for the period 500 years previous; and in the year of war, 1369, despite the embargo with Denmark, a great consumer, the exports of herring from thirty Hanseatic ports yielded a sum of 130,000,000 marks, 40,000,000 of which fell to the share of Hamburg, then a much smaller city than Lubeck.

It is natural, in the light of these commercial conditions, that industry, and handicraft also, must have greatly flourished.  In those days there were twice as many bakers in Lubeck as at present.  The coopers, also, in view of the great demand for herring kegs, were in high repute, and scarcely less so the brewers, who at that time greatly excelled their South German competitors.  The beer of Hamburg or Rostock was