THE HISTORY OF COMMERCE
surgents at Shimabara, they made no objection. When ordered to enter what was virtually a prison at Deshima and to abandon all their religious exercises, they submitted unresistingly. It was certainly fortunate for Japan that the Dutch showed so much complaisance, since, insignificant as was the trade at Deshima from a national point of view, and slight the traders' contact with the Japanese people, there can be no doubt that had that door of ingress been closed to progressive ideas, Japan could scarcely have crossed the threshold of her new career in the nineteenth century without a catastrophe. To the Dutch themselves, also, the monopoly they thus secured brought considerable profits. For although they were not allowed to develop their business without limit, although the visits of their vessels were never permitted to exceed two annually and were ultimately reduced to one, yet in the disordered state of Japan's currency, in the arbitrarily fixed ratios between gold, silver, and copper, and in the people's ignorance of the value of foreign manufactures, they found an opportunity which they turned to such good account that between 1609 and 1858 they are said to have exported over forty million pounds sterling of gold and silver as well as two hundred thousand tons of copper. Deshima is now spoken of as a gate through which the wealth of the country flowed away incessantly during two centuries and a half, and some justice must be conceded to the definition.
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