4. Write a report on the business career of Sir Thomas Gresham, one of the great English financiers of the sixteenth century. [Encyc., Dict. of nat. biography, and references in those sources.] 5. Write a report on Antwerp in the sixteenth century. [See Motley, Rise of Dutch Republic, N. Y., 1858, vol. 1, 81 ff., chap. 13.] 6. Benefits and dangers of speculation. [Hadley, Economics, chap. 4.] 7. Manias and panics, modern and recent. [Bourne, Romance, chap. 11.] 8. Write a report on one of the following topics: (_a_) The tulip mania. [Oxley, Romance of commerce, chap. 3.] (_b_) The “Bubble” period in England, [Cunningham, Growth, vol. 2, sect. 218; Oxley, chap. 2; cf. Lecky, Hist. of England, and cf. Macaulay’s history of bubbles about the time of the founding of the Bank of England.] (_c_) John Law and the Mississippi Bubble. [Oxley, chap. 1.] (_d_) The Fugger family. [Paul Van Dyke, A captain of industry of the sixteenth century, Harper’s Magazine, June, 1910, 120: 276-284.] BIBLIOGRAPHY As the subjects of this chapter have been treated generally by specialists, and considered in their relation to modern economics rather than earlier history, the reading is scattered, and, for our purposes, unsatisfactory. The chapter by Cunningham in the first volume of the Cambridge modern history covers in part the ground of this chapter. The important commercial crises are described in the histories of England, France, etc. CHAPTER XVIII THE MODERN STATE AND THE MERCANTILE SYSTEM =181. Growth of modern states under the influence of commerce.=—If the modern reader is impressed, in studying the history of Europe before 1500, with the influence on commerce of the lack of strong government, he will be equally impressed, in the period from 1500 to 1800, with the strength of government and with the important part it played in commercial development. We have here to sketch in brief the changes in political conditions, leaving to later chapters a consideration of the details as they appear in the history of different countries. Commerce itself was the great force that broke the power of feudalism. Commerce crept through the barriers that kept localities apart; it established a circulation of wares through a large area of country; and it concentrated wealth in the cities which it built up. These were the very changes needed to allow the world to escape from feudal anarchy, and to construct a system of government similar to that which the Romans had employed. Kings had now subjects able and willing to pay taxes, and, by means of commerce, they could transport their taxes, turn the proceeds into any shape they chose, and apply them wherever it was necessary.