of thirteen states lying along the seaboard with nothing behind them to look to. With thoughts turned ever to the sea, we reached out for foreign markets and acquired them. With them we built up a class known as Merchant Princes, comparable in a smaller and more democratic way to the Doges of Venice, who, in turn, largely invested their fortunes acquired in the foreign trade in the development of our interior. Then our minds turned away from the sea for "where your treasure is there will your heart be." The heritage of Tyre, which first passed to Venice and then to Portugal, later to the Hanseatic League and then to England, was ours for a brief moment in world-time, but we did not grasp it firmly and hold it. Venice today teaches us a lesson that it is not too late to turn to our profit.

From their mud huts on their mud islands the Venetians-not the Venetians of doublet and hose, with their embroidered velvets and jewel hilted swords-turned first to fishing for

a livelihood, exactly as did our own ancestors along the New England coast; and then their thoughts roved to more distant points until they became coast traders and finally ventured overseas to the Levant and Asia Minor, au example that was again followed by our forbears of the United States.

Somebody learned to make bricks from the mud of the flats of Venice and houses appeared. Bridges began to span the mud islands until a community interest was established. The straits between the islands became canals. Venice began to emerge from the unlovely mud just as the flats themselves had emerged from the sea. And during all this period Venetian ships were seeking out foreign markets for the goods of their neighbors along the Adriatic and trading between them.

Having at the time no produce of their own to trade, these people could not trade among themselves and be content with a general swapping about of the wealth which was theirs.

Driven by necessity, they sought to trade in the goods of others and brought back the increment to their own people. Architecture began to appear, Byzantine and Gothic, capriciously adapted to the Venetian spirit and environment. The great church of St. Mark's was erected and by law all traders were compelled to bring from the East some material for its adornment until, in the words of the period, it began to resemble the treasure house of a "gang of sea sharkers."

All the world began to pay tribute to Venice because it was Venice that commanded the means of sea communication between the people of the world, and that tribute was presently coined into treasures of art that have endured to this day. The Palace of the Doges appeared and attracted the great artists of the world for its decoration. Wealth began to flow in an unceasing stream and found its use in the erection of monuments to the achievement of its masters and because the thought of all of

Venice was the same as that attributed to Antonio by Salarino in "The Merchant of Venice":

"Your mind is tossing on the ocean;

There, where your argosies with portly sail,
Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood,
Or, as it were, the pageants of the sea,
Do overpeer, as it were, the petty traffickers
That curtsy to them, do them reverence,

As they fly by them with their woven wings." Venice was now a splendid city, rich, powerful and potent, her merchants amassing wealth and, like all "nouveau riche," seeking culture and artistic expression; a thing at which we indulgently smile when brought face to face with its manifestations among our own people, unmindful of the fact that it is from the "nouveau riche" that the culture of later generations comes. All hail to the "nouveau riche" who some day will be the "haute noblesse!"

Venice had nothing to begin with but the mud and the sea together with the desire to