With this accords the fact recently pointed out with regard to the literary history of the movement, that what is peculiar to all the mercantilist writers is not so much the regulations of trade which they propose for the increase of the precious metals as the stress they lay on the active circulation of money, especially within the state itself.(32*)The struggle against the great nobility, the towns, the corporations, and provinces, the economic as well as political blending of these isolated groups into a larger whole, the struggle for uniform measures and coinage, for a well-ordered system of currency and credit, for uniform laws and uniform administration, for freer and more active traffic within the land, - this it was which created a new division of labour, a new prosperity, and which liberated a thousand forces towards progress. As the territorial policy had rested on the overthrow of independent local and town policies, on the limitation and modification of local institutions, upon the increasing strength of the general interests of the whole territory, so now there followed, for centuries, a struggle between state and district, between principality and province, a task which was doubly difficult in those cases where the state did not yet include the whole nation. This struggle was primarily an economic one; it had to do with the removal of all the old economic and financial institutions, and with the creation of new joint interests and of new and united institutions. It was a process which in Italy and Germany reached its full conclusion only in our own, day which in France was not quite finished in 1789; which even in Great Britain was not completed till late; and in the Republic of the United Netherlands halted midway in its course.
It is now to be noticed that it was the "enlightened," more or less despotic, monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by which this movement was initiated and pushed forward. Its whole activity centred in economic measures; its great administrative reforms were anti-municipal and anti-provincial, and aimed chiefly at the creation of larger economic organisms. With these princes mercantilist policy was not something subsidiary; all that they planned and performed necessarily took this direction.
I mentioned above that in the United Netherlands, which attracted such universal admiration about the middle of the seventeenth century, - the towns and provinces retained a great deal of their old independence; and the local and provincial spirit, there so strong, had even certain favourable consequences; but it could lead to greatness, power, and wealth, only so long as it was overridden by the opposite movement towards centralisation. Even the Burgundian princes had done much for the economic unity of the land by their enlightened administration; in later times Holland and Amsterdam preponderated so greatly in power and resources, that their voice was frequently decisive and alone considered. More, however, was done for consolidation by the Eighty years' War of independence, and by the House of Orange in the various complicated official relations in which it stood towards the decisive economic questions of the time. The Admiralty Board (Oberadmiralitatscollegium) remained in existence only for a few years (1589-1593); but after this the House of Orange remained at the head of the Admiralty in the separate states; and upon the Admiralty depended not only the fleet, but also the whole tariff system, and indeed all maritime trade. Colonial policy, navigation policy, the regulation of the Levant trade, of the herring and whale fisheries, and the like, were all centralised.
A glance into the rich contents of the "Resolution Book of the High and Mighty Lords the States-General of the United Netherlands" (Placaet-Boeck der hochmogenden Herren Staaten-Generael der vereinigte Nederlande) shews us to how large an extent the economic and commercial policy of the flourishing time of the republic was the outcome of a common Netherlandish egoism.
Its rapid declension begins with the period during which there was no governor (Stadtholder); and the most signal cause of this decline was the preponderance in one field after another, after about 1650-1700, of bourgeois localism and provincialism.
