34 THE WORK OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE 
superstructural city life built about it, the parent market place 
of the city steadily performed its less striking but more basic 
economic functions. The daily exchange of goods among 
unremembered merchants, the influx of imports, and the out- 
flow of exports, went quietly on. While on the Acropolis 
Pericles was planning a greater Athenian empire, while Phidias 
was carving the white loveliness of the reliefs on the Parthenon, 
or while Plato was discoursing of immortality in the Academy, 
the purchase and sale of goods proceeded steadily in the 
Pireeus—in the main unremarked by the historians and unsung 
by the poets, and yet fundamentally vital to the glory and power 
of the Athenian state. 
On the other hand, once its market place had decayed, the 
city which so often scorned it, so often viewed it as an objec- 
*ionable congregation of noisy sharpers and rascals, was smit- 
ten as if with a palsy. Indeed, the ever-shifting routes of trade 
and the stern competition between market places have left a 
wake across the world of ruined cities, of abandoned or decayed 
communities, of rotting harbors, whence in better days intrepid 
tradesmen went down to the sea in ships to satisfy the clamor 
of the market place for the goods of distant lands and strange 
peoples. 
The mere passage of time has not altered this inexorable 
economic law. The great cities of the present day exist at the 
sufferance of supply and demand. As market places they 
arose, and as market places they will continue to prosper, or 
else go the way of Venice and Carthage. America is still too 
young a nation to realize the full significance of her market 
places. There seems no particular limit set against the continual 
growth of her cities. Yet we too must cherish our market 
places, lest in the end we learn the bitter lesson which was 
forced upon the Pheenicians of Tyre or the Greeks of Corinth. 
Evolution of the Market Place.—The earliest and simplest 
markets were formed by the congregation in one place of 
buyers and sellers, driven together by the economic necessities