had then already entered upon its epoch of decline. Like Genoa and Venice, when new roads of commerce had dispossessed them of their old mercantile supremacy, it was forced to lend out to other nations its capital, grown too large for the vessels of its own commerce. Its fatherland had begun to lie there where the best interest for its capital was paid. Russia, therefore, proved an immense market, less for the commerce, than for the outlay of capital and men. To this moment Holland has remained the banker of Russia. At the time of Peter, they supplied Russia with ships, officers, arms and money, so that his fleet, as a contemporary writer remarks, ought to have been called a Dutch, rather than a Muscovite one.[84] They gloried in having sent the first European merchant ship to St. Petersburg, and returned the commercial privileges they had obtained from Peter, or hoped to obtain from him, by that fawning meanness which characterises their intercourse with japan. Here, then, was quite another solid foundation than in England for the Russianism of statesmen, whom Peter I had entrapped during his stay at Amsterdam and the Hague in 1697, whom he afterwards directed by his ambassadors, and with whom he renewed his personal influence