{57} The carriage is 24 L. a ton backwards and forwards, or out and home, which is only equal to what is paid in England by land for 500 miles.  Indeed, none but articles of a very great value and high price could pay for the carriage by any of the channels hitherto discovered but that of the Cape. -=-

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degraded before this change happened; for though the commerce came through their countries, the riches it produced centred in Italy.  Syria had long become a desert, and the ruined palaces were become the habitations of scorpions, reptiles, and beasts of prey, long before those discoveries which seemed to have sealed their doom.  That discovery only completed what had long been begun, and rendered permanent and irrevocable what might otherwise have been altered. {58}

At the rate at which this trade now goes on to increase, all the gold and silver mines in the West, will soon be insufficient to afford enough of the precious metals to pay for produce from that country:  for few European manufactures are taken in return.  This is laying a foundation for a great revolution, either in manners or in nations at some future day.

It is extraordinary that, from the earliest ages, the inhabitants of India have been receiving gold and silver from all other countries, and yet, that those metals are not so abundant there as with European nations.  As our demand for the produce of the mines increases in order to send remittances in specie to that country, the mines themselves diminish in their produce, so that whatever change this may bring on, can be at no very great distance. {59}

—–­ {58} What Dr. Robertson says of Palmyra may be applied nearly to all the cities in Asia and Africa that shared in this commerce.  “Palmyra, after the conquest by Aurelian never revived.”  At present, a few miserable huts of beggarly Arabs are scattered in the courts of its stately temples, or deform its elegant porticoes, and exhibit a humiliating contrast to its ancient magnificence.

{59} If the taste of the Anglo Americans for tea continues, allowing one pound to each person in the year, which is very little, one hundred millions of pounds weight will be annually wanted in less than half a century. -=-

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CHAP.  VII.

Of the Causes that brought on the Decline of the Nations that had flourished in the middle Ages, and of Portugal, Spain, Holland, and the Hans Towns.

The trade with India, which had been almost the only one, and always an occasion for envy and contest, was sought for by the Spaniards and the Portuguese; who, as we have seen, were the first amongst modern nations that seemed to aspire at naval discovery.

The manner in which Spain discovered America; and Portugal, the passage by the Cape of Good Hope, both nearly at the same period, and at the beginning of the sixteenth century, is too well known to require the smallest detail.