The Mercantile System and its Historical Significance [19]
state and district, between principality and province, a task which was doubly difficult in those cases where the state did not yet include the whole nation. This struggle was primarily an economic one; it had to do with the removal of all the old economic and financial institutions, and with the creation of new joint interests and of new and united institutions. It was a process which in Italy and Germany reached its full conclusion only in our own, day which in France was not quite finished in 1789; which even in Great Britain was not completed till late; and in the Republic of the United Netherlands halted midway in its course. It is now to be noticed that it was the "enlightened," more or less despotic, monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by which this movement was initiated and pushed forward. Its whole activity centred in economic measures; its great administrative reforms were anti-municipal and anti-provincial, and aimed chiefly at the creation of larger economic organisms. With these princes mercantilist policy was not something subsidiary; all that they planned and performed necessarily took this direction. I mentioned above that in the United Netherlands, which attracted such universal admiration about the middle of the seventeenth century, - the towns and provinces retained a great deal of their old independence; and the local and provincial spirit, there so strong, had even certain favourable consequences; but it could lead to greatness, power, and wealth, only so long as it was overridden by the opposite movement towards centralisation. Even the Burgundian princes had done much for the economic unity of the land by their enlightened administration; in later times Holland and Amsterdam preponderated so greatly in power and resources, that their voice was frequently decisive and alone considered. More, however, was done for consolidation by the Eighty years' War of independence, and by the House of Orange in the various complicated official relations in which it stood towards the decisive economic questions of the time. The Admiralty Board (Oberadmiralitatscollegium) remained in existence only for a few years (1589-1593); but after this the House of Orange remained at the head of the Admiralty in the separate states; and upon the Admiralty depended not only the fleet, but also the whole tariff system, and indeed all maritime trade. Colonial policy, navigation policy, the regulation of the Levant trade, of the herring and whale fisheries, and the like, were all centralised. A glance into the rich contents of the "Resolution Book of the High and Mighty Lords the States-General of the United Netherlands" (Placaet-Boeck der hochmogenden Herren Staaten- Generael der vereinigte Nederlande) shews us to how large an extent the economic and commercial policy of the flourishing time of the republic was the outcome of a common Netherlandish egoism. Its rapid declension begins with the period during which there was no governor (Stadtholder); and the most signal cause of this decline was the preponderance in one field after another, after about 1650-1700, of bourgeois localism and provincialism. It is a consideration of the economic history of France that most clearly brings out the fact that the mercantilism that was everywhere making its way was at least as much a matter of transformation and union at home as of barriers against the world outside. Louis XI (1461-1483) castdown the great houses of Burgundy and Anjou, of Orleans and Bourbon, resisted the narrow selfishness of the corporations, sought to bring about uniform weights and measures in France, and forbade the importation of foreign manufactures. The edict of 1539, which introduced freedom of trade in corn in the interior of France, particularly between the several provinces, sets out with the assertion that in a united political body the several districts should, at all times, help and support one another. The declaration in 1577 that trade, and in 1581 that industry, belonged to the droit domanial had not so much a fiscal as a centralising