=4. (3) Risk of loss at the hand of public enemies or robbers.=—The carrier of merchandise has to face not only physical difficulties, but also dangers from another source. From time to time we read in the modern newspaper of high rates charged for war insurance, when ship or cargo may be captured and confiscated by an enemy on the sea. The merchant must count his insurance charges before he can figure out his profits. This illustration will make clear the character of one of the obstacles to commerce, which we may term military, by some stretching of the current meaning of the word. It gives, however, no idea of the extent of this danger in earlier times, when not only were wars far more common, but when even in times of peace the state was so weak that the merchant, in every mile of his progress, was exposed to attack by highwaymen on land and by pirates at sea. Either the merchant must bear his own risks, or pay somebody to protect him against them. In either case the result would be the same, the necessity of charging higher prices for the wares, and so making sales less attractive and less common. =5. (4) Political restrictions.=—Still another element can be distinguished in history, which seems often to be an obstacle to the development of commerce. This element may be termed the political. A man is not only a producer and consumer; he is also, whether he is conscious of it or not, a member of the state, and subject to some kind of political organization which restrains and directs him in his economic life. His efforts to further his own interests are restricted by laws meant to protect the interests of the people as a whole against the selfishness of individuals. A merchant in the United States who proposes to import some ware from another country will find that he must pay not only the natural transportation and insurance charges, but possibly also a customs duty in addition, that would make the exchange unprofitable. If he proposed to import a foreign ship for use in the American coasting trade he would find that he is absolutely prohibited from doing this, no matter how much he might be willing to pay as duty. These restraints are imposed nowadays, not because the government assumes that individuals cannot take care of themselves and is afraid that they may lose money by making purchases abroad, but because it thinks that they may hurt the interests of producers in the home market, whom it proposes to protect. We shall find that governments in earlier times restrained the flow of commerce to protect not only producers but also consumers and even the merchants themselves; and that regulations were imposed, of such variety and such strictness, that they made a very important element in the commercial life of peoples. The church as well as the state interfered with the course of exchange in the Middle Ages, and thought it necessary to safeguard public morals by many restrictions which have since disappeared. QUESTIONS AND TOPICS