When we consider its advantages as a general meeting-place for varied foreign commercial interests, a first view will profit us little. London is on no general European highway but lies ex-centric to Europe far upon the north and west of the general area which European culture covers; nor does its more central position since the discovery of the New World avail the argument, for the greatness of London was planted and its future continuance assured long before Europeans had known and developed the Western Continent. London, again, does not seem to invite commerce by lying upon the frontier common to two civilisations; it does not lie upon any economic boundary line as do the cities of the Levant and notably the cities of Palestine. It is, if we consider the economics of commerce during at any rate the first 1500 years of our era, almost at the edge of the world. To explain the supremacy of London as a market more than one thesis is put forward for general acceptance which must, I think, be condemned. Thus we have the thesis that London occupies the position it does _because it is almost in the centre of the land hemisphere_. As a matter of fact the actual centre of that hemisphere is not far from the neighbourhood of Falmouth, and is at any rate within the limits of Britain. If we trace upon a globe a great circle or “equator” so as to include the greatest mass of land surface possible, we find our southern ports, and London amongst them, to lie near the Pole of such an Equator, and this argument has been of some weight with those who have not paused to consider what that “land hemisphere” means. If the climate of the world were everywhere equal and most of its soil equally productive, then the fact that the great estuary of the Thames lay almost central to the greatest mass of land would have its importance--though the mouths both of the Seine and of the Scheldt, of the Rhine, and for that matter of the Elbe, would not be so far distant as to explain the peculiar supremacy of London. But in the first place the most part of that mass of land did not enter into the commercial scheme until quite modern times, and secondly, the variations of its climate and of its productivity destroy the theory. Not far to the north of our port (relatively to so great a thing as the planet) lies that vast circle of uninhabited or hardly habitable frozen land which is not only almost useless for the purposes of exchange, but which also bars any passage of commerce across it. Not so very far to the south, again, runs the belt of desert east and west across Africa and Asia, the worst part of which, the widest, is also the nearest to us and is called the Sahara. It is of little use to have a central position between, say, Japan upon the one side and Cape Town upon the other, if the Greek Circle which connects us with Japan passes, as it does, through the Polar Ice. There are certain central positions which explain the supremacy of some particular site,