his merchants' secret? Through what phases, before this, had run and shifted the commercial struggle between young Greece and ancient Phoenicia imaged for us in Matthew Arnold's famous simile:

As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,
Descried at sunrise an emerging prow
Lifting the cool-hair'd creepers stealthily,
The fringes of a southward-facing brow
Among the Ægean isles:

And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,
Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,
Green bursting figs, and tunnies steep'd in brine;
And knew the intruders on his ancient home,

The young light-hearted masters of the waves;
And snatch'd his rudder, and shook out more sail,
And day and night held on indignantly
O'er the blue Midland waters with the gale,
Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily,

To where the Atlantic raves

Outside the Western Straits, and unbent sails
There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets

of foam,

Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;

And on the beach undid his corded bales.

What commerce followed the cutting of Rome's great military roads?—that tremendous one, for instance, hewn along the cliffs close over the rapids that swirl through the Iron Gates of Danube. By what caravan tracks, through what depots, did the great slave traffic wind up out of Africa and reach the mart at Constantinople? What sort of men worked goods down the Rhone valley; and, if by water, by what contrivances? To come a little later, how did the Crusaders handle transport and commissariat?

Through and along what line of entrepôts did Venice, Genoa, Seville ply their immense ventures? Who planted the vineyards of Bordeaux, Madeira, the Rhine-land, and from what stocks? Who, and what sort of man opened an aloe market in Socotra? Why, and on what instance, and how, did England and Flanders come to supply Europe, the one with wool, the other with fine linen and naperies?

Now of these and like questions-for of course I might multiply them by the hundred-I wish, first of all, to impress on you that they are of first importance if you would understand history; by which I mean, if you would take hold, in imagination, of the human motives which make history. Roughly (but, of course, very roughly) you may say of man that his wars and main migrations on this planet are ruled by the two great appetites which rule the strifes and migrations of the lower animals-love, and hunger. If under love we include the parental instinct in man to do his best for his mate and children (which includes feeding them, and later includes patrimonies and marriage portions) you get love and hunger combined, and doubled in driving power. Man, unlike the brutes, will also war for religion (I do not forget the Moslem invasion or the Crusades) and emigrate for religion (I do not forget the Pilgrim Fathers): but, here again, when a man expatriates himself for religion the old motives at least 'come in.' The immediate cause of his sailing for America is that authority, finding him obnoxious at home, makes the satisfaction of hunger, love and the parental instincts impossible for him save on condition of renouncing his faith, which he will not do.

Neither do I forget-indeed it will be my business, before I have done, to remind you that hundreds of

thousands of men have left home and country for the sake of learning. There lies the origin of the great universities. But here again you will find it hard to separate at all events from the thirteenth century onward-the pure ardour of scholarship from the worldly advancement to which it led. Further, while men may migrate for the sake of learning I do not remember to have heard of their making war for it. On this point they content themselves with calling one another names.

To cut this part of the argument short―Of all the men you have known who went out to the Colonies, did not nine out of ten go to make money? Of all the women, did not nine out of ten go to marry, or to 'better themselves' by some less ambiguous process?

We are used to think of Marathon as a great victory won by a small enlightened Greek race over dense hordes of the obscurantist East; of Thermopylae as a pass held by the free mind of man against its would-be enslavers. But Herodotus does not see it so. Herodotus handles the whole quarrel as started and balanced on a trade dispute. Which was it first-East or West-that, coming in the way of trade, broke the rules of the game by stealing away a woman? Was Io that woman? Or was Europa? Jason sails to Colchis and carries off Medea, with the gold: Paris sails to Sparta and abducts Helen-both ladies consenting. Always at the root of the story, as Herodotus tells it, we find commerce, coast-wise trading, the game of marriage by capture: no silly notions about liberty, nationality, religion or the human intellect. It is open to us, of course, to believe that Troy was besieged for ten years for the sake of a woman, as it is pleasant to read in Homer of Helen watching the battlefield from the tower above the Skaian gates, while the old men of the city marvel at her beauty,

saying one to another 'Small blame is it that for such a woman the Trojans and Achaeans should long suffer hardships.' But if you ask me, do I believe that the Trojan war happened so, I am constrained to answer that I do not: I suspect there was money in it somewhere. There is a legend I think in Suetonius, who to be sure had a nasty mind-that Caesar first invaded Britain for the sake of its pearls; a disease of which our oysters have creditably rid themselves. And even nowadays, when we happen to be fighting far abroad and our statesmen assure us that 'we seek no goldfields,' one murmurs the advice of Tennyson's Northern Farmer

Doänt thou marry for munny, but goä wheer munny is.

Money? Yes: but let your imagination play on these old trade-routes, and you will not only enhance your hold on the true springs of history; you will wonderfully seize the romance of it. You will see, as this little planet revolves back out of the shadow of night to meet the day, little threads pushing out over its black spaces-dotted ships on wide seas, crawling trains of emigrant waggons, pioneers, tribes on the trek, men extinguishing their camp-fires and shouldering their baggage for another day's march or piling it into canoes by untracked river sides, families loading their camels with figs and dates for Smyrna, villagers treading wine-vats, fishermen hauling nets, olive-gatherers, packers, waggoners, long trains of African porters, desert caravans with armed outriders, dahabeeyahs pushing up the Nile, busy rice-fields, puffs of smoke where the expresses run across Siberia, Canada, or northward from Capetown, Greenland whalers, Newfoundland codfishers, trappers around Hudson's Bay....

The main puzzle with these trade-routes is that while

seas and rivers and river valleys last for ever, and roads for long, and even a railroad long enough to be called a 'permanent way,' the traffic along them is often curiously evanescent. Let me give you a couple of instances, one in quite recent times, the other of today, passing under our

eyes.

A man invents a steam-engine. It promptly makes obsolete the stage-coaches, whose pace was the glory of England. Famous hostelries along the Great North Road put up their shutters; weeds begin to choke the canals; a whole nexus of national traffic is torn in shreds, dissipated. A few years pass, and somebody invents the motor-car-locomotion by petrol. Forthwith prosperity flows back along the old highways. County Councils start re-metalling, tarspraying; inns revive under new custom: and your rich man is swept past a queer wayside building, without ever a thought that here stood a turnpike gate which Dick Turpin or John Nevinson had to leap.

For a second change, which I have watched for a year or two as it has passed under my own eyes at the foot of my garden at home.-As you know, the trade of Europe from the West Coast of America around the Horn is carried by large sailing-vessels (the passage being too long for steamships without coaling stations). One day America starts in earnest to cut the Panama canal. Forthwith the provident British shipowner begins to get quit of these sailing-vessels: noble three- and four-masters, almost all Clyde-built. He sells them to Italian firms. Why to Italian firms? Because these ships have considerable draught and are built of iron. Their draught unfits them for general coasting trade; they could not begin to navigate the Baltic, for instance. Now Italy has deep-water harbours. But the Genoese firms (I am told) buy these ships for the second