=222. Growth of business activity.=—The prosperity of Dutch foreign commerce was reflected in business activity at home. The Netherlands rapidly outstripped the southern low countries (now Belgium), which suffered cruel repression under Spanish rule; and the great commerce of Antwerp passed to Amsterdam. Speculation and banking developed in their various forms and the Netherlands became the money center of Europe. Scholars find in the Dutch business life of this period many features which are strikingly modern; speculation in stocks, commercial crises, pools, and “trusts.” Manufactures felt the impulse of progress, and broke the bonds of the old gild system for more modern forms of enterprise. Large establishments grew up; new industries were introduced (hats, silk, tanning, etc.); the Huguenot refugees expelled from France were granted a welcome for which they gave a rich return. =223. Commercial decline of the Netherlands.=—When and why did the Netherlands lose the commanding position in European commerce? What country took the lead away from it? Those are questions which the student of the history of commerce must face, and in the following paragraphs the answers will be given. There is no doubt about the last point; Netherland lost the leadership to England. The time when this change occurred can be stated with almost equal brevity; it was during the one hundred years between 1650, roughly the date when Cromwell gathered up the scattered forces of England to use them for her commercial advancement, and 1750, when the commercial supremacy of England could no longer be questioned. The reasons for the change are as usual the hardest as they are certainly the most valuable topics to be studied. One reason can be stated here as a fact, to be proved afterwards in detail, that England was growing stronger. On the Dutch side, was the Netherlands growing weaker, or did it simply fail to keep pace with the English advance?