The Mercantile System and its Historical Significance [27]
which was still making its way upward. In such a time of harsh international and economic struggles, he who did not put himself on his defence would have been remorselessly crushed to pieces. As early as the sixteenth century, it became apparent what a disadvantage it was for Germany that it had neither the national and politico-commercial unity of France, nor the mercantilist regulations to which both England and France were beginning to resort. And this was still more apparent in the seventeenth century. The military and maritime Powers of the West not only drove the Germans out of the few positions they had at first obtained in the colonial world; they menaced more and more even the trade they had long possessed. The Hanseatic merchants were driven out of one position after another. One after another the mouths of the great German streams passed into foreign hands: the Rhine came under French, Dutch, and Spanish suzerainty, the Weser under Swedish, the Elbe under Danish, the Oder under Swedish, the Vistula under Polish control. The tolls imposed by these foreign masters at the mouths of the streams gave the river trade, in many cases intentionally, its last blow. While the Dutch destroyed the Hanseatic trade in their own markets by differential duties; while they and the English made the direct trade of Germans with Spain and Portugal impossible, by violence and the confiscation of ships; the Dutch misused, with increasing dexterity, their growing preponderance on the Rhine and in the Baltic to put Germany itself into a position of unworthy dependence in all matters of business. As the only or most important purchasers of German raw products and the only suppliers of Indian spices, they secured an almost intolerable monopoly, which reached its climax through the unconditional dependence of Germany on the Dutch money market during the period 1600-1750. And what Holland was with regard to Indian wares, France was with regard to manufactures and objets d'art. Those Hanseatic towns that were not ruled by Dutch business managers (Lieger) were in slavery to English creditors. Denmark sought to destroy German navigation, fisheries, and trade by its tolls on the Sound and the Elbe, and by its commercial companies. And all these conditions affected Germany most severely, not in the Thirty Years' War, but one, two, or three generations later; when the western Powers had firmly established their new politico-economic institutions. With naive pleasure in their maritime and commercial strength, with the support of a brutal international law, and a diplomacy which forced upon weaker and less experienced peoples, by every art of intrigue, unprofitable and perfidious commercial treaties, they openly adopted the half-true, half-false doctrine that the trade advantage of one state always was and always must be the disadvantage of another. In the period from 1670 to 1750 the bitterest lamentations were heard in Germany about this commercial dependence, about French manufactures, about the traders from every prince's land that overran the country: the torrent of complaint touching the pitiable condition of the imperial government, which was unable to give any assistance, increased like an avalanche. The state of commerce in Germany, cried the most distinguished economic writer of the time, depends upon the interest taken in it in the Reichstag at Ratisbon. At last all the voices, alike of scholars and of the people, came together in unison: There is but one way out of it; we must do what Holland, France, and England have done before us; we must exclude the foreign wares; we must once more become masters in our own house. Facts had taught them, with inexorable clearness, that, - at a time when the most advanced nations were carrying on the collective struggle for existence with the harshest national egoism, with all the weapons of finance, of legislation, and of force, with navigation laWS and prohibition laws, with fleets and admiralties, with companies, and with a trade under state guidance and discipline,- those who would not be hammer