that the trader or merchant who does all the good he can to himself, with out regard to the interests of others, making a fortune by the practise of every trick and deception not cognizable in a court of law, is little better than the thief who robs a hen-roost and suffers incarceration. The difference between human law and divine justice is, that the one deals with actions and the other with motives. Acts are all that human law can touch; it cannot punish the disposition, however base and wicked it may be, unless it show itself in some overt act. Divine justice regards acts as straws, and looks to the motive and disposition as the test of the character of the action, as whether it be good or bad. The first we call the law of the land-the last, the morals of society. Moral rules and precepts and arguments apply to those instances which the law of the land cannot touch from the nature of the case. The young merchant, bent upon a fortune, has made the fatal mistake of considering himself only amenable to the former, and it is against such a view that we would employ the remainder of this paper. You say, "I came here to make a fortune." Is not your object happiness and respectability? Are you not involved in the general state of refinement and prosperity of the place in which you live? Suppose you do amass wealth, and, at the same time, see immorality, knavery, and vice growing at an equal pace about you; if you have a family whose education you regard, if you think of the security of your property, if happiness means contentment, peace, and security, the enjoyment of ease of mind and body, how have you compassed your end by this selfish course? Your family is invaded and your sons ensnared by vice; your house or store is burned by an incendiary, or broken open and ransacked. You live in continual fear of violence; you have no reliance upon the word of men who were schooled in the same precepts as those by which you gained your present position. Are you happy? You have no right to be. You labored for money. You have it. You worked not for the public good; you said nothing about public education; you gave nothing to establish the institutions of religion and benevolence in the city, and you have no right to ask for effects you did not work for: you did not sow, neither shall you reap. Take your fortune; enjoy it if you can. Too late will our ambitious young merchant find out that trade means something more than making money. Would he be a good farmer who should sow and till his land and gather his harvest without having a barn or shed in which to store it away from the weather? Is he a good merchant who gives his sole attention to the accumulation of fortune without preparing about him, as far as he can, a state of society in which wealth may be enjoyed? Wealth alone cannot confer happiness. The sacred page teaches this; experience teaches it; all ancient and modern philosophy derides the idea of its being the chief good. And yet it is pursued singly, unremittingly, with the loss of health, by separation from home, away from friends, and wife, and children, at any sacrifice,-we blush to say it-sometimes by the sacrifice of truth and honesty, as if it were the whole business of life. The temptations which beset the merchant are stronger than those which assail almost any other class; and one of the most prominent of these is personal extravagance. The mechanic makes his five or ten dollars a day, and but little money passes through his hands, besides that which he receives for his actual labor; while the merchant, even when making noth ing a day, is receiving thousands and tens of thousands by agency or otherwise, and is deluded and cheated out of a view of his actual condition, by the bustle and activity about him. The loss of to-day may be necessary to the gain of to-morrow; upon the whole he may be a gainer; he is losing thousands every day, but this is to end in some grand scheme which is to cover all his losses and place his name high up on the rolls of 'change. All this time he goes on in his usual style of living. His personal expenses are considered a mere flea-bite, when compared with the immense amounts passing through his hands, and a difference of five or ten thousand dollars in a failure for hundreds of thousands is a very small matter. Thus he reasons. But the loss falls with a heavy hand somewhere; and perhaps the children of his servants and others in his employment, his butcher, his baker, have to suffer in the diminution of their few and humble pleasures and comforts, for the extravagant expenditure of an establishment, whose best foundation was a reasonable hope of making a fortune. The large speculator must keep up appearances; he must live in a large house; give expensive entertainments; his wife and children must dress in the richest fabrics. And why? Oh, to show that he is confident of success; that his projects are good and secure; for, reason good people, the man would not keep up such state and show, unless he was pretty sure. Now the fact is, the man is not pretty sure; but he wishes to make you good people think so. It does not take a sage to see that this is all wrong; that one may not justly expend money to keep up appearances, to enlarge his credit and increase confidence. Suppose success does crown four efforts in five of this kind, the one failure spreads dismay, want, and misery that no amount of general happiness can recompense. The rule of law, that it is better ninety-nine guilty persons should escape, rather than one innocent man should suffer, applies here. Better that no great fortune should be made, no grand operations call down the applause of bankers and brokers, than that by a reckless run of chances, one poor, deserving person should be pinched in his little wants. But the effects of personal extravagance, and the keeping up of appearances, does not end in the amount of money expended. There is another account open, which every man, whether he will or not, is obliged to keep, -that with his own heart and conscience. Who can tell how from small sacrifices of principle; running risks which may succeed nine times in ten; borrowing at usurious interest, to pay one man, to buy on time of another; hedging and doubling, the fair merchant "loses that nice sense of honor which felt a stain as a wound," and, at last, is ready to plunge headlong into desperate speculation to save him a little longer from his inevitable fate. The very fact that he is living beyond his means, when known to a man, must rob him of his self-respect and make a beginning in his character of unfairness and insincerity which will probably end in dishonesty and fraud. We say then, that extravagance based upon a probability of realizing money from business, upon any other ground than a certainty, is unjustifiable, however common it may be. There is in reality no weight, no shadow of reason in this keeping up appearances. It is a false doctrine, and only gives a man the chance, if he does fail, of involv ing more in his ruin. The longer a sinking house lives after it is bankrupt, the more fatal is its last gasp. And this is one of the peculiar VOL. VI. NO. I. temptations of the merchant, which, if he loves justice, he must withstand. Washington Irving has strongly painted the struggle of a highminded man, in his hour of mercantile adversity, between the world and his duty. It is in the story of "The Wife," a story every merchant may read with advantage. For after the struggle was over and he had retrenched his expenses to his mears, the noble Leslie confessed he never felt so happy before. But another and perhaps more insidious temptation assails the merchant, or rather merchants, as a class; the power of making their own conventional rules, gives them the opportunity of establishing a false code, specious, plausible, and deceptive, by which they shall attain their ends by doing wrong with the appearance of doing right. Let merchants think of the immense power placed in their hands and tremble. They need the wisdom of Solomon, and the justice of Aristides. Every city merchant has under his influence, in all parts of the country, men of every grade in trade, who from a sense of obligation, by credit furnished them, extensions, &c., are ready to listen and subscribe to what he may seem to think is right. The country merchant, who deals out his goods in shilling sales, looks with a kind of respect and deference up to the man who deals in whole cargoes, and whose clerk-hire alone amounts to more money than he turns by his yearly business. He therefore gets his cue when he purchases his goods, and carries home in his mind the tone he has learned in the city. Does he see any unfairness?-is any stratagem confided to him by which money is to be made?-he straightway concocts his own little tricks upon the poor people of his neighborhood. He mixes sand with his sugar; pares off the end of his yardstick; reduces not only his liquors, but his vinegar; and makes up for their want of pungency by poisonous compounds. He not only charges thirteen cents for twelve and a half, and seventeen cents for sixteen and two thirds, but he does what he has no right to do, and what the buyer only submits to because credit is necessary to him and he is, as it were, in the power of the country trader, by some old debt-he charges thirty-four cents for thirty-three and one third. It is better that the buyer should lose one third of a cent than that the seller should lose two thirds, and so he justly charges on his book seventeen cents for sixteen and two thirds; but why does not the rule operate in favor of the buyer when his purchase amounts to only thirty-three cents and one third? Straws show which way the wind blows; and we may as well see the relation between buyer and seller in this little operation as in a larger matter. There is-who will deny it ?-a systematic grinding of the people by the small traders in the country; and we fear it is because there is a systematic grinding of the traders by the city merchants. What can be more unfair, more unmanly, more undignified, to call it by no harsher name, than the system of dressy clerks, boarding at hotels to make the acquaintance of raw countrymen; to carry them to the theatre, wine them, &c., and then take them to their stores and sell them goods at twice their value? When Jonathan gets home, and his addled brain has recovered from the combined commotion of the splendor, politeness, and wine, to make himself whole, he must continue upon his customers, if he can, the imposition that has been practised upon himself. Some poor girl out at service in the country village, at four shillings a week, pays her shilling towards healing this wound the sagacity of Jonathan has received, and perhaps the poor widow contributes her share to the purse also. Cuswin authorizes such things. Merchants make their own laws. If all do it, it is right. This is a fair presumption in such an age as this. But so artful and sophistical are the pleadings of self-interest, that the position of the merchant is one of great temptation, and in reality he possesses a power which he may abuse. On the other hand, he possesses this power for good. What a generous, magnanimous spirit may he infuse into his country correspondence, by the fairness, justice, and generosity of his dealings with them! They need this. The country trader, doing a small business with people who have little ready-money, making his gains by half cents, and feeling willing to make any sacrifice rather than lose his credit in Pearl-street, stretches his conscience to its utmost tension, often, from the perplexity of his situation. He wishes to sell to people who have land and stock, even if they have no money. His safe is already full of their notes; but the cash to meet his payments must be raised, and now comes the struggle, the evasion, the lie, the fraud. Trade is poisoned, corrupted, and has a demoralizing tendency, when things come to this pass. Perhaps the city merchant has been to blame in giving Jonathan two much credit, by which he has got his hands full of the notes of these people. He has become a petty tyrant in his neighborhood. Everybody owes him, and now he can charge them what he pleases, and regulate all the politics and religion of the village into the bargain. The lash a small lawyer holds ready to let fall at his bidding, is the argument he uses to enforce his wishes. This is a dreadful state of things, yet not uncommon. You may ride through a beautiful country of fine farms, with peaceful cottages scattered through it, and you say to yourself, "Here is peace, plenty, and happiness." Alas, yonder husbandman, resting beneath the shade of a tree, is indulging in no pleasant reflection. He is thinking of the debt he owes at that little, black, dingy-looking store which stands somewhere near the tavern and meetinghouse, with large square windows and wooden shutters, and a horse-hitch before it. The man who trades there does not find it necessary to modernize and ornament his building in order to draw customers. He has no competitor in business. He is in fear of none. But the evil day comes at last. It must come. There is a dreadful day at hand, when things are to find their level, and oppression, sacrifice of property, dismay and ruin closes up a scene which is to be enacted at some other time, in the same or some other place. These then are the great temptations of the city merchant, to make a fortune, by some means, in as short a time as possible, and to underrate and misuse the influence he may have upon the character of the country merchant. We have other views of this matter, which we must defer to another occasion. FREE TRADE. Free as the winds, and chainless as the sea, THE WORLD SHOULD BE THE MARKET OF MANKIND. ART. III.-NEW SOURCES OF TRADE. NUMBER ONE. THE BARBARY STATES. "Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis' Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the Arctic Circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and roman. tic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longi tude and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries, no climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of hard industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people; a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.”—Mr. Burke's speech on conciliation with the Colonies, March 22, 1775. NEARLY seventy years have elapsed since Edmund Burke gave utterance to the above sentiments on the floor of the British House of Commons. Although at the time they more directly applied to the whale fisheries of New England, they as properly belonged to every branch of foreign commerce which the jealousy of the mother country allowed the colonies to follow. If Edmund Burke could, from the slumbers of the tomb, behold the mighty progress of that people "then in the gristle," after sixty years of self-government, he could truly repeat his own beautiful apostrophe to Lord Bathurst" Whatever England has been growing to by a progressive increase of improvement, brought in by varieties of people, by succession of civilizing conquests, and civilizing settlements in a series of seventeen hundred years, you shall see as much added to her by America in the course of a single life!" How truly prophetic! Let the increase of population from two and a half to seventeen millions answer. Let the thousand remote fields covered with harvests, where then roamed the beast, and the savage almost as wild as the game he pursued, answer. Let the steamboat that penetrates the Missouri and the Mississippi three thousand miles from the Gulf of Mexico answer. Let the two millions of tonnage that float wherever wind or steam can carry them, at the poles or the equator, answer. Her commerce, her manufactures, her agriculture, all speak of her present, and point to the future greatness that rests upon her name. If her people are but true to themselves, no nation that ever flourished, Carthage, Greece, Rome, not even England herself, will compare with what is to come. The territories of our country are so vast, capable of sustaining a population of five hundred millions, our soil so rich, climate so various, and productions so numerous, that it scarcely seems within the bounds of credibility to suppose aught can frustrate her advancement. We are emphatically a COMMERCIAL nation: the first impulse given to our prosperity was from trade with foreign countries; the simple productions of our forests alone, consisting of timber, staves, peltries, and ashes, needed an outlet, and at the close of the revolution were, with the ex |