=190. Political importance of commerce in this period, connected with the desire of governments for ready money.=—Commercial expansion in this period depended, as said above, on the political power of the home country. Did not, on the other hand, the political power of the state depend on commerce? A statesman of the time would have answered this question in the affirmative, and with an emphasis which would seem strange now. We think nowadays that the resources of a state depend upon the prosperity of the people, no matter whether this prosperity comes from agriculture or from manufactures, from internal trade or from foreign trade. Statesmen, however, of the period under discussion, set a peculiarly high value on foreign commerce, and regarded it as a more important branch of industry than any other. [Illustration: EUROPEAN POWERS IN AMERICA (About 1700) ] The chief reason for this view lay in the fact that most of the European states produced little or none of the precious metals, and could get them only by trade with a neighbor or with a distant country. Now money is “the sinews of war,” and when states were constantly at war with each other, a good supply of money seemed to the statesman a matter of the first necessity. We regard money nowadays only as a means of procuring other forms of capital by exchange, and do not worry about the money supply so long as capital in other forms is abundant. It may have been the fact, however, that in the early period of the modern state the fiscal and military systems operated more smoothly when the stock of money in the country was abundant. =191. The mercantile system, aiming to increase the stock of ready money in the country.=—Whether rulers were justified or not in the anxiety that they showed about the money supply, they made it a cardinal point in their policy to regulate commerce so as to increase, if possible, the stock of the precious metals in the country. They argued that the country would make money if it sold more merchandise to foreigners than it bought of them, for then the foreigners would have to make up the balance in coin or bullion. This was called “a favorable balance of trade,” as tending to bring money into the country. On the other hand, if the country became indebted for foreign merchandise to an amount greater than could be offset by the exports, the country would owe a cash balance abroad, and this was an “unfavorable” balance of trade. At the beginning of the period the government tried to effect its object simply by prohibiting the export of bullion (gold and silver); this was the “bullionist” policy.