this fact. Under the old system of overland and limited trade, Venice could only provide for such puny exchange and flow as the mediæval system of Europe demanded. She would have been unable to cope with such a flood of inflowing metal as the sixteenth century witnessed, and Europe would have been overwhelmed. But the foundations of the commerce of the Netherlands were laid wider. Together with Portugal she opened an extensive empire along the coasts of Africa and in the Indian East; and the very time which gave birth to the revolution in the production of the precious metals in America saw provision made for the regulation of its outflow through the commerce and exchanges of Antwerp to India. In the modern system this would be a theoretically perfect world-mechanism, and its working would be normal and healthy, and the safest indicator of commerce. That it was not so to seventeenth-century Europe was simply due to the existence of a disordered, understood bimetallic system, and the crisis to which the working of this mechanism brought her has Page 64 perhaps not been since equalled at any point of
The underlying causes of this crisis have been already described. The currencies of the trading nations of Europe were all unconsciously bimetallic. Throughout, there was in existence one class who grasped the fact without any knowledge of the theory, and profited by it—the merchant exchangers. There was constant