The prophet Ezekiel, who wrote in the sixth century before Christ, incidentally described in his chapter xxvii the commerce in commodities, that then centered in the city of Tyre on the eastern Mediterranean. "_All the ships of the sea with their mariners were in thee to traffic in thy merchandise: many islands were at hand to thee for trade: with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs: they brought thee for payment horns of ivory and ebony-wood._" Among the commodities besides these exchanged in that market, are mentioned by the prophet horses and mules and lambs and rams and goats, wine of Helbon and white wool, fine linen and embroidered work, and riding cloths and mantles of blue and chests of damask and thread, wheat and pastry and syrup and oil and balm, precious spices and cassia and sweet reed, and gold and carbuncles and corals and rubies. These old Phoenicians of Tyre colonized Carthage, and thus bore a vast trade in commodities to the West, going overland into the heart of Africa for dates and salt and gold-dust and slaves, and by sea through the Pillars of Hercules northward to the British Isles for the sake of the trade in tin. The amount of transactions in commodities, the first class of Valuables, has been constantly increasing, under natural impulses which we shall have shortly to describe, from the dawn of authentic History down to the present moment; and figures are baffled in expressing to our minds the sum of these transactions even in a single country, still more their aggregate in the commercial world. The foreign trade of every country is almost exclusively in commodities, and is only a small fraction of its domestic trade in the same; and so, when we remember that the foreign trade of the United States, for example, under a commercial system designed and adapted to curtail such trade, amounted in 1889 to about $1,600,000,000, and the foreign trade by Great Britain the same year to about 4,000,000,000, we gain a glimpse, we touch as it were the hem of the garment, of the gigantic traffic of the world in commodities alone. _The Production of Commodities is the getting them ready to sell and the selling them._ 1. We must look first at the REQUISITES of such production. They are three, _Natural Agents_, _Human Efforts_, _Reserved Capital_. The following lines of Whittier touch incidentally on these three requisites, and may serve us as a general introduction to them:-- "Speed on the ship!--But let her bear No merchandise of sin, No groaning cargo of despair Her roomy hold within. "No Lethean drug for Eastern lands, No poison-draught for ours: But honest fruits of toiling hands, And Nature's sun and showers!"