on in their own, and is much greater, on account
of the great riches and extent of those
colonies. But it has never introduced any
considerable manufactures for distant sale into
either of those countries, and the greater
part of both still remains uncultivated. The
foreign commerce of Portugal is of older
standing than that of any great country in
Europe, except Italy.
Italy is the only great country of Europe
which seems to have been cultivated and improved
in every part, by means of foreign
commerce and manufactures for distant sale.
Before the invasion of Charles VIII., Italy,
according to Guicciardini, was cultivated not
less in the most mountainous and barren parts
of the country, than in the plainest and most
fertile. The advantageous situation of the
country, and the great number of independent
states which at that time subsisted in it, probably
contributed not a little to this general
cultivation. It is not impossible, too, notwithstanding
this general expression of one of
the most judicious and reserved of modern
historians, that Italy was not at that time better
cultivated than England is at present.
The capital, however, that is acquired to
any country by commerce and manufactures,
is always a very precarious and uncertain possession,
till some part of it has been secured
and realized in the cultivation and improvement
of its lands. A merchant, it has been
said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen
of any particular country. It is in a
great measure indifferent to him from what
place he carries on his trade; and a very trifling
disgust will make him remove his capital,
and, together with it, all the industry which
it supports, from one country to another. No
part of it can be said to belong to any particular
country, till it has been spread, as it
were, over the face of that country, either in
buildings, or in the lasting improvement of
lands. No vestige now remains of the great
wealth said to have been possessed by the
greater part of the Hanse Towns, except in
the obscure histories of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries. It is even uncertain
where some of them were situated, or to
what towns in Europe the Latin names given
to some of them belong. But though the
misfortunes of Italy, in the end of the fifteenth
and beginning of the sixteenth centuries,
greatly diminished the commerce and manufactures
of the cities of Lombardy and Tuscany,
those countries still continue to be among
the most populous and best cultivated
in Europe. The civil wars of Flanders, and
the Spanish government which succeeded them,
chased away the great commerce of Antwerp,
Ghent, and Bruges. But Flanders still continues
to be one of the richest, best cultivated,
and most populous provinces of Europe. The
ordinary revolutions of war and government
easily dry up the sources of that wealth which
arises from commerce only. That which arises
from the more solid improvements of agriculture
is much more durable, and cannot
be destroyed but by those more violent convulsions
occasioned by the depredations of
hostile and barbarous nations continued for a
century or two together; such as those that
happened for some time before and after the
fall of the Roman empire in the western provinces
of Europe.