George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 3, 15th edition.

Thus the commercial interest was, in European politics, become paramount; it framed alliances, regulated wars, dictated treaties, and established barriers against conquest.

The discovery of America, and of the ocean-path to India, had created maritime commerce, and the great European colonial system had united the world. Now, for the first time in the history of man, the oceans vindicated their rights as natural highways; now, for the first time, great maritime powers struggled for dominion on the high seas. The world entered on a new epoch.

Ancient navigation kept near the coast, or was but a passage from isle to isle; commerce now selected, of choice, the boundless deep.

The three ancient continents were divided by no wide seas, and their intercourse was chiefly by land. Their voyages were, like ours on Lake Erie, a continuance of internal trade; the vastness of their transactions was measured, not by tonnage, but by counting caravans and camels. But now, for the wilderness commerce substituted the sea; for camels, merchantmen; for caravans, fleets and convoys.

The ancients were restricted in the objects of commerce; for how could rice be brought across continents from the Ganges, or sugar from Bengal? But now commerce gathered every production from the East and the West; tea, sugar, and coffee, from the plantations of China and Hindostan; masts from American forests; furs from Hudson's Bay; men from Africa.

With the expansion of commerce, the forms of business were changing. Of old, no dealers in credit