202 COMMERCE WITH From the earliest accounts we possess, down to the period when the Arabs acquired, with a new religion, a new character, no material change appears to have taken place in their mode of conducting the Indian trade, for the invasion of their monopoly of that traffic by the Greeks of E- gypt, under the Roman government, seems not to have wrought any material change. I think it by no means probable that the Arabs ever reached the country of spices, or any portion, indeed, of the Indian Archipelago, before their conversion to the Mahomedan religion. A semibarbarous people, not roused to activity and enterprise by that de- velopement of character which nothing is capable of generating but a revolution in religious opi- nions, is timid in disposition, and stationary in so- ciety. Besides this, whenever an Asiatic people trade extensively in any country, they soon settle or colonize in it ; because, unlike the restless and romantic Europeans, delighting in enterprise and novelty, they never quit a better country for a worse, — because, in a new country, their rank in society is always improved, — and because their manners, never very remote, soon assimilate with those of the natives. Thus, the Mahomedan Arabs settled on the west coast of India, in the Indian Archipelago, in China, even in Siam ; and the Hindus and Chinese have each settled in the Archipelago. We have no proof that the Pagan
