"If all the Low Countries had remained attached to the confederation, they would all have partaken of the riches, the industry, the power, and the grandeur of the United Provinces. The Austrian Low Countries were not able to recover their brilliant commerce, because they had lost it. To repair this loss, it would have been necessary, that Holland and England, filled with their manufactures, should have had the complaisance to send them back all these manufactures with their riches, their workmen, and their raw materials. It was only Louis the Fourteenth who could in this respect take Philip the Second for a model. If the Flemish and the Brabantians, should have again a source of raw materials, and of workmen, would it be easy to recall industry and naturalise it there, after so long an exile? The little progress of commerce in those countries has many other causes, besides the subjugation of one of its brooks. It is necessary to look for them in the multitude and enormity of the duties imposed upon merchandises, which enter, or go out of the Austrian dominions, duties, which are repeated from one Province, and even from one city to another; it is necessary to look for them in the tyrannical and insolent inquisition of officers, with whom the frontiers are covered, in the fiscal and iniquitous subjection, to which packages and travellers are exposed; the former to a search, which exposes the goods to be spoiled, and the other to an indecent and odious inspection. They have forced women to strip themselves, even to their shifts, to discover, with a scandalous avidity, effects subject to these odious taxes. "A part of the commerce of Germany, and several Provinces of France with Holland, would have no other market than the Low Countries, if the imposts and the collection of them were not tyrannical. The merchants of St Quentin, of Rheims, of Paris, will all tell you, that the lawns, wines, and modes, which they send into the countries situated upon the Baltic, would be embarked at Ostend, without those armies of inquisitors like highwaymen, who drive away, by a perpetual restraint, commerce, the friend of liberty. Add to this, the delays, and the dearness of land-carriage, interrupted with barriers, in the countries, where there are no canals; all these obstacles do not only hurt the commerce of transportation, but also that of importation and exportation. The foreigner, finding so many difficulties in spreading his superfluities in those countries, is the less capable of taking off theirs.