NAVIGARE NECESSE EST, vivere non est necesse or in translation is necessary to carry on navigation, it is not necessary to live:' This old Hansa proverb is found inscribed over the door to the old shipping house in Bremen. It embodies the spirit the North German towns in the later Middle Ages. To the people those towns, trade, on land and sea, was considered more important than living. No sacrifice was too great that commerce might flourish, for commerce was the fundamental link between individuals and groups. Not that these people gave birth to this idea, for ever since the dawn civilization trade and bartering have been the fundamental principles intercommunal relations between men. So important was trade that the earliest codes law provide for its safeguarding. Even so men found it necessary to band together in groupsguilds or leagues-to protect themselves against arbitrary rulers or bandits and pirates. Such groups as the Lombard League, the Swabian League, the League the Rhine, and the Hanseatic League, to mention only a few, were organized for the purpose protecting and preserving trade. Of these the Hanseatic League was the most important. The terminal dates the history the Hanseatic League are fixed in divers manners by historians. Some claim that the span its activities covers only the second half the fourteenth and all the fifteenth centuries, while others definitely extend that span to a period over eight hundred years, i.e., from the eleventh to the eighteenth century. Even so there are those who feel that the League as a real unit with central government and headquarters was a mere specter or will-o'-the-wisp, of calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire;' eluding man's search as buried treasures. All these opinions carry some truth. Daenell's Bliitezeit' or golden prime theory can be sustained as well as disproved. If sustained it reveals a well organized League with a governing council and headquarters, with colonies and allies, and with a brisk inter-European exchange trade. If disproved it makes the League a loose organization, torn by strife and jealousy within, and threatened from abroad by constant conflicts with foreign powers and foreign merchants.