PURSUIT OF ALBION^247and in 1870. The old Hanseatic cities of Frankfurt and Hamburg, rich
in history and pride, yelped with pain, but in such matters, La
Fontaine's dictum applies: La raison du plus fort est toujours la
meilleure, or might makes right.
The tenacity of the enemies of other people's trade fairly beggars the
imagination. Take the river Scheldt. It rises in northern France and
flows through one of the most prosperous industrial regions in the
world on its way past Tournai, Ghent, and Antwerp to the sea. Some
distance below Antwerp, by the accidents of history, the mouth of the
river passes into Holland, which by the Treaty of Munster in 1648 ob
tained the right to close it to navigation. This Holland did, for over two
hundred years, for the aim was to kill Antwerp as seaport in favor of
Rotterdam—no small matter. For fifteen years, however, from 1815 to
1830, Antwerp and Rotterdam were both part of the Netherlands, so
in theory, these rights should have lapsed. Not at all: in 1830, when
Belgium seceded, Holland reaffirmed its right and got the other in
terested powers to accept this levy on international trade. Not until
1863 could Belgium, after long negotiations, buy in this outrageous
toll, with each of the powers interested in the trade paying its quota.
The sole exception to this process of rationalization and unification
was the persistence of customs barriers at the entrance of cities, what
the French call the octroi. These survived into the twentieth century;
even the railway had not managed to kill them (one could always in
spect baggage on arrival). It was the automobile that did the job: as the
number of vehicles increased, it became impossible to halt them at city
boundaries for inspection of contents; or to compel Paris autos, for ex
ample, to submit as in the 1920s to a dipstick measurement of the fuel
in the gas tank upon leaving and returning. Even so, as late as the
1960s, road signs advised drivers entering Florence from the sur
rounding countryside to declare such commodities as wine and ciga
rettes. So far as I could tell, no one stopped or was stopped; but I was
a short-term visitor.
Russia was a different story. Transport was difficult, to begin with,
and tolls were not a problem. Nature was. On land, it was easier to
move goods in winter than in summer. Snow and ice were smooth; the
roads were not. Water was better for bulky commodities (grain, tim
ber). But Russian rivers run north-south, and most traffic moved east-
west. Here cold was the enemy: in the south, waterways remained
open nine months of the year; in the north, only six weeks. Miss the
cut-off, and goods would perish; machines, rust; idleness, turn into
oblivion.