I am not quite sure that, as a general rule, “a high rate of interest and profit is an infallible sign that industry and trade are yet in their infancy,” and still less that lowness of interest is a sign of a flourishing country.[1660] On the contrary, I should infer, from the former, that trade was in that healthy state in which it is scarcely a speculation; and, from the latter, that its current had become stagnant. However, a high interest was paid, and great profits were made in antiquity. Of this a striking example is furnished by Herodotus. A Samian ship trading with Egypt was, by some accident, led to push its way westward, as far as Tartessos, in Iberia, antecedent to the period at which the Greeks began to trade regularly with that port.[1661] What the nature and value of its cargo may have been is not known, any more than the articles which it received in exchange. The conjecture, however, that it received silver at a low rate, as the Phœnicians anciently did, is not improbable. At all events, the merchants engaged in this adventure cleared upon that one cargo the sum of sixty talents, of which, in pious gratitude, they dedicated a tenth to Hera the tutelar goddess of their island. And this historian adds, that, with the exception of Sostratos of Ægina, the most fortunate of mercantile adventurers, no Grecian merchant had ever up to his time made so successful a voyage. ----- Footnote 1660: Compare Hume’s Essay on Interest, p. 172, sqq. with Mr. Bœckh’s Public Economy of Athens, i. 82. Footnote 1661: Herod. iv. 152. ----- CHAPTER X. NAVIGATION.