=173. Description of business in Antwerp in the sixteenth century.=—After considering the new forms of business from the standpoint of individual firms it will be profitable to study them in the city that was the business center of the time, where all the great firms were represented by agents. This city, in the first part of the sixteenth century, was Antwerp, which rose as the medieval port of Bruges declined. There have been, of course, greater cities and greater markets since that time, but never before or since, it is said, has the world seen such concentration of the trade of different peoples in a single place. The town owed its development almost entirely to the foreigners who flocked there to trade, and though it saw less of Italians and Hanseatics than Bruges had done, it was the one great gathering place for the Portuguese, Spanish, English, and German merchants who were now the leaders. It is said that over five hundred vessels sailed in or out of the port in one day, and that the English merchants alone employed over 20,000 persons in the city. The poet Daniel Rogiers said of the Antwerp exchange, “One heard there a confused murmur of all languages, one saw there a motley mixture of all possible costumes; in short the Antwerp bourse seemed to be a little world in which all parts of the great were united.” In contrast with Bruges, trade in Antwerp was almost entirely unrestricted, and this was perhaps the chief reason why the merchants of the time selected it as the place in which to develop the new forms of business. =174. Rise of the Antwerp exchange; its significance.=—Antwerp presented in the sixteenth century the first case of a great bourse or exchange, that is, a place in which men meet daily and effect their exchanges without displaying and transferring the wares themselves, by the use of paper securities representing the wares. Such an institution cannot exist until the volume of trade is large enough to cause a steady and continuous flow of wares, in contrast to the spurts that marked the period of the fairs. It requires, moreover, that the objects dealt in be of such a kind that they can be represented at the exchange by some document or sample, so that the buyer can learn the quality of the ware without actually inspecting it. This is possible when a ware can be _graded_, put into a certain class the characteristics of which are so closely defined and so well known that the buyer needs only to decide whether he cares to take a certain quantity at a certain price.