A ready demand for import must exist either in a port itself or behind it, if that port is to develop into a great town and to acquire political importance. You have many instances, especially in contemporary commerce, of ports which do little more than export, and of other ports in which there is no demand for import, but which merely serve to pass the import inland. In the first case the international exchange is effected through imports at some other point. The clearing between export and import is a paper clearing, and the ships at the export point arrive in ballast--a drawback. In the second place, though a town may grow to some importance as a mere place of transhipment, it will never acquire the importance of a capital nor even of a great city--it will never have a great _political_ place unless, round the handling of its imports destined for the interior, there grows up a considerable local power of demand for values. In other words, something of the imports transmitted through the town must “stick on the way.” Modern Liverpool is a good example of this. The primary economic function of modern Liverpool is still the transhipment of cotton to Lancashire just beyond its boundaries, but in the pursuit of this function Liverpool has claimed its tribute for now three generations, and so vast an accumulation of other activities connected with the port has grown up that even the digging of the Manchester Ship Canal, the effect of which was so much feared in Liverpool, seems to have been, if anything, a benefit to that town. What proportion the power of demand exercised for imported goods in Liverpool itself may bear to the total of values entering the port cannot be exactly calculated, but it is safe to say that the toll levied is not much less than one-fifth. Now when to this power of demand created by the “sticking” at the point of transhipment or port of import, of goods coming from abroad, there is added the power of demand caused by the residence of government, of a court and of wealthy men apart from those who are wealthy through commerce, you get, of course, a very highly increased power of demand which makes of the port of import a specially great economic centre. A ship coming to such a port in order to take on board there the export in which it deals, can enter loaded with imports which are sure of a ready market. [Illustration: SUNBURY]