Beginnings of the American People | Page 7

gems worth a
city's ransom." In that country, says Rubruquis, "whoever wanteth

golde, diggeth till he hath found some quantitie." Oderic tells of a
"most brave and sumptuous pallace" in Java, "one stayre being of silver,
and another of golde, throughout the whole building"; the rooms were
"paved all over with silver and gold, and all the wals upon the inner
side sealed over with plates of beaten gold; the roof of the palace was
of pure gold." As for the Grand Khan, he had, according to Marco Polo,
"such a quantity of plate, and of gold and silver in other shapes, as no
one ever before saw or heard tell of, or could believe." And so freely
did the returned traveler discourse of Kublai Khan's millions of saggi
of revenue, that he was ever after known in Italy as Ser Marco Milioni.
In contrast with this country, how small and inferior is Europe! Such is
the most general impression conveyed by the accounts of the travelers.
Do you think you have some powerful kings here?--they have always
the air of asking--some great rivers, populous and thriving cities? But I
tell you Europe is nothing. "The city of Quinsay," says Oderic, "hath
twelve principall gates; and about the distance of eight miles, on the
highway unto each one of the said gates, standeth a city as big by
estimation as Venice and Padua." And this trade of the Levant,
profitable as you think it, is but a small affair. On a single river in
China, the greatest in the world, "there is more wealth and merchandise
than on all the rivers and all the seas of Christendom put together." Of
that great wealth, very little, indeed, ever comes to the Levant: "for one
ship load of pepper that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere, destined for
Christendom, there come a hundred, aye and more too, to this haven of
Zaiton"; while the diamonds "that are brought to our part of the world
are only the refuse of the finer and larger stones; for the flower of the
diamonds, as well as of the larger pearls, are all carried to the Grand
Khan or other princes of these regions: in truth, they possess all the
great treasures of the world."
What a reversal of values for that introspective mind of Christendom,
so long occupied with its own soul! And what an opportunity,--all the
great treasures of the world possessed by people who welcome
merchants but "hate to see soldiers"; being themselves "no soldiers at
all, only accomplished traders and most skillful artisans." Here was the
promised land for Europeans, wretchedly poor, but good soldiers

enough. Here was Eldorado, symbol of all external and objective values
which so fired the imagination in that age of discovery; presenting a
concrete and visualized goal, a summum bonum, attainable, not by
contemplation, but by active endeavor; fascinating alike to the
merchant dreaming of profits, to the statesman intent on conquest, to
the priest in search of martyrdom, to the adventurer in, search of gold.
III
And who was not in search of gold? "Gold is excellent; gold is treasure,
and he who possesses it does all that he wishes to in this world, and
succeeds in helping souls into paradise." So thought Columbus,
expressing in a phrase the motto of many men, and conveniently
revealing to us an essential secret of European history. For gold, so
abundant in the East, was scarce in the West. The mines of Europe have
never been adequate to the needs of an expanding industrial civilization.
Importation of expensive Eastern luxuries, normally overbalancing
exports, produces a drain of specie to the Orient, that reservoir to which
the precious metals seem naturally to flow, and from which they do not
readily return; so that to maintain the gold supply and prevent a fatal
appreciation of money value has been a serious problem in both ancient
and modern times. During the Roman Republic the supply of gold was
maintained at Rome by the systematic exploitation of Syria and Asia
Minor. But after Augustus reformed the government of the provinces,
the accumulated treasure of the West began to return to the Orient: the
annual exportation of 200,000,000 sesterces in payment for the silks
and spices of India and Arabia, of Syria and Egypt, was one of the
causes of economic exhaustion and the collapse of imperial power. "So
dear," says Pliny, "do pleasures and women cost us."
During the age of feudal isolation, this ever-recurring problem did not
exist; and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it seems not to have
been pressing. Imports from the Orient were nearly balanced by exports
to Syria, for which the crusading movements and the Kingdom of
Jerusalem created an abnormal demand. The rise of trade in the West
was