takes a note of the merchant, which represents and pledges property to an equal amount. But this note is not current as money, nor can it be subdivided so as to pay labor and buy materials. He goes to the bank, therefore, and exchanges this credit for one that is divisible and current as money, by giving a small premium. The consumer, who is likewise a producer, has sold his product to the merchant, and got his note discounted in the same way. Thus the bank notes, having performed the functions of money, are again paid into the bank, and they cancel the original notes. If all parties are honest, and no man consumes more than he produces, at the end of the year there is no loss to any party, and the whole process of production, distribution, and consumption, has been completed with greater ease and cheapness than it could have been in any other way, by a mixed currency of coin and bank notes. Such are the legitimate operations of a bank, and it is one of the happiest contrivances of modern times. Nothing can be more calculated to develop the resources of a new country, where nothing is so much wanted as capital, and where it is desirable to turn the products of labor into money as soon as possible, and thus make them available for new productions. Nothing could be more unwise or unfounded, than the prejudices which have of late been excited against them. They are said to be aristocratic institutions. The very opposite is the fact, so long as their stock is free to the purchase of all; they are equally open to the rich and the poor, so that they enable the poor to become capitalists on the same terms with the richest. This is, in fact, one of the great benefits which they confer upon society. They bring into active and gainful use small portions of capital, which would otherwise have remained idle and useless, for want of knowledge on the part of their possessors how to use them to advantage. I have no doubt, too, they are moralizing in their influence upon business men, by making them more careful of their characters and expenditure. They are most truly republican and levelling in their tendencies, inasmuch as they make character and business talent immediately available to every young man that is starting in the world, and thus diffuse business, instead of concentrating it in the hands of a few colossal capitalists.

That banks are capable of abuses, and great abuses, I do not deny; but this is no more than can be said of every thing else that is good. All they require, to be the most useful institutions, is honest and prudent management; to be restrained from disproportionate issues, and to be kept strictly within the sphere of an intermediate agency between the producer and the consumer; and, moreover, a wise and steady government, which will so regulate its intercourse with foreign nations, as always to keep nearly the same amount of coin in the country, to be the basis of banking operations. Such is the position of the merchant in society, and such the functions he performs in the great machinery of human affairs. Such are the materials and the instruments with which he works, as the general agent between the producer and consumer of the various productions of human labor. After this general view, we shall be able more clearly to point out his dangers, his temptations, and his duties.

In the first place, there is apt to be too great a rush into the profession. It is supposed to be the easiest and most expeditious way of acquiring wealth; and wealth, it is supposed, brings with it all imaginable good. There is the same delusion about it that there is about lotteries; the eye is attracted and fascinated by the glare of a few splendid prizes, while the

greater number of blanks is never taken into account. So the young man, as he walks the streets of cities, is dazzled with the splendor of a few palaces, or the fame of a few mercantile houses, which he sees engrossing to themselves a great portion of its business. These things he sees; but he does not see the far greater number, who sailed upon the same sea, but sunk long ago, and are seen no more. He does not see the toils and anxieties by which that wealth has been amassed, which bleach the locks, and wrinkle the brow, faster than any other pursuit.

There is a delusion with regard to trade into which the unreflecting are too apt to fall-that of supposing it can be increased to any extent by more people going into it. It is not like agriculture in this respect. Agriculture is a real production of the necessaries of life. Every new acre brought under cultivation increases the means of subsistence to the human family. There is no danger of over-production; for agricultural products are not only the primary and universal means of sustaining human life, but they are the basis of all other employments and professions. As they expand, other things will naturally keep pace. But a small country-town can expend no more than they earn; and if a reasonable profit on their consumption will sustain but one trader, two would not increase the business, but only divide it, and probably ruin both. Just so of a city or a nation.

This excessive competition becomes a snare to mercantile life, for it is too apt to induce unfair means to get and retain customers, either by giving unreasonable credits, or adopting a ruinously small rate of profits. It is this excessive competition, and the practices to which it has led, which has given rise to a saying which I often hear, but never without the warmest indignation, that it is impossible for a merchant to be an honest man. If this be the fact, all I have to say is, let the profession perish from among men. Such an anomaly was never intended to exist in the creation of God. If this be a fact, let cities be swallowed up, and commerce be buried in the bosom of the ocean. Let mankind return to barbarism, if they cannot innocently live in society: But it is not a fact. One moral law runs through the universe, and is supreme in the human soul-the law of morality, the law of truth, honor, and integrity. It equally pervades and governs every profession and occupation in life. No man ever derived any solid advantage from violating one iota of it. It leads to ruin ten times where it procures even a temporary benefit. The merchant's moral trials are great, and occur more frequently than those of any other pursuit. They are the greater from the fact, that the limits of commercial honor and honesty have never been defined. It has never been settled, and perhaps never can be, how far a merchant may honorably avail himself of his knowledge and another's ignorance of the value of commodities, and the state of the markets. In commending his goods too, there seems to be no limit fixed how much he may say by way of offset to the disposition he supposes to exist on the other side to depreciate them. There is a passage in one of the Apocryphal books, which has always struck me as containing a most fearful warning of the moral perils of trade, and those who are engaged in it are better judges than I, whether it be satire or truth. "As a nail sticketh fast between the joinings of stones, so doth sin stick close between buying and selling." It is certainly one of the easiest things in the world to commend a thing we wish to sell beyond the bounds of strict truth, and to conceal those defects which we are in

honor bound to declare. It is still more difficult to be practically convinced that our true interest lies in the same line with the most transparent integrity. But that it does, no man who believes in God or truth, has the least reason to doubt for a moment. The first great temptation to which the young merchant is exposed is that of going into business without sufficient knowledge, without sufficient capital, without sufficient business prospects. To the young man impatient to establish himself in life, this may seem a hard saying, and a discouraging sentiment. But it is a view of things which it is necessary for him to take for his own good. For although it may seem a great evil for a young man to see the best years of life passing away while he is accomplishing nothing of those vast schemes with which the youthful mind is ever teeming, there are far worse evils than this on the other side of the alternative. It may seem hard to be doing nothing, but it is still worse to be laboring to no purpose, to embark in a project which is desperate from the beginning, every movement of which is pain and difficulty, and the issue always involved in the shadows of doubt, sometimes in the blackness of darkness. The anxieties of business are sufficiently great under all circumstances, its perpetual risks are enough to disquiet life under the most favorable conditions. But when to this are added the trouble which spring from insufficient means, want of skill and mistaken enterprises, there is scarcely any situation more undesirable.

The second temptation to which I shall advert, is that which besets the prosperous merchant. Great prosperity is generally the merchant's snare; and if you hear a merchant complain of being in trouble, you may be almost sure that he will tell you, that it is not long since he was in the full tide of successful experiment. The reason of this is, that success gives a man credit, and tempts him to give credit in turn. And credit, though one of the most useful of things, is one of the most dangerous. At first it is plausible and hopeful, but in the end it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder. It may make a man's fortune, and it may make a man a slave for life. In quiet times the profits of business may keep pace with the high interest of money. But too often the industrious merchant, who has grown gray in toil and care, on a review of his life, discovers that he has been at work from his youth for the most disinterested purpose of giv ing the money-lender six per cent. This abuse of credit leads not only individuals, but nations astray. When, by means of banks, credit itself is transformed into money and becomes the basis of new operations, then its tendency is to carry up the nominal prices of every thing, and lead everybody into the delusion that they are rapidly growing rich. Things are bought and sold without any reference to demand, or use, or consumption, and the merchant attempts to do as much business in one year as he ought to do in three. But this mania, though commencing among the mercantile classes, is not confined to them. The staid farmer, the sober mechanic are bitten, and become as rabid as the rest of the community. They are told of a great rise which has taken place in the value of their property, and they wish to realize it. They sell at an advance perhaps, and realize in the first instance, but having cut loose from sober reason they cannot be contented to reinvest in solid, useful property-or if they did, other property has advanced as much in nominal value as their own-but purchase something which they hope to sell again. Thus property shifts hands, each time at an advance, till at last the bubble bursts, the world

wake up from their trance, and find the sum total of real wealth no greater than it was before, and the last holders are ruined at the very moment when they thought they had realized a fortune.

Beware then of speculation. It is the syren which sings over the rocks of ruin. Shut your ears to her song, hurry away from the sound of her voice. Be contented with the moderate profits of a regular business. Be sure to keep coolest when all the world are becoming most excited: you may, in so doing, not only save yourself, but be of lasting service to others.

This leads me to warn you against the original sin which is the source of all those actual transgressions-the inordinate desire of becoming suddenly rich. Suppose you were to succeed at a very early age, the chances are more than even, that the command of means plunges you into dissipa tion, which is perdition to soul and body. It brings in the prize too soon, and thus cuts short the pleasures of the chase. Gradual accumulation is more safe and more happy. I do not mean to undervalue the advantages of wealth. I know they are many and great. But the desire of an overgrown fortune is little else than insane. It makes a man a slave while he lives, and when he is gone it is more frequently the source of litigation, alienation, and misery, than happiness to his heirs. I hope it is unnecessary to warn any one who hears me this night, against a species of moral turpitude which we sometimes see exhibited in the mercantile world—business undertaken with reckless purposes from the beginning. No words can describe the moral obliquity of that man, who gets large amounts of property into his hands, and then considers it as lawful prize, to support his own unprincipled habits of expense and extravagance. The robber upon the high seas is no more to be looked upon as a public enemy than the man who gets into his possession the hard earnings of the poor and industrious, the little all of the trusting mechanic or poor widow, and applies it to his own purposes of luxury and profusion.

Nor is it, I trust, any more necessary to warn you against the adoption of a merely legal morality. Such is the imperfection of laws, that they are quite as potent to make a wrong as to correct one, and some of the most stupendous frauds are committed under their sanction. He who attempts to justify to himself such a course of conduct, will soon find every principle of honor sapped within him, and finally be betrayed, when he least expects it, into transactions which will involve him in disgrace and ruin. There is but one road to permanent happiness and prosperity, and that is the path of unspotted integrity, of high-souled honor, of the most transparent honesty.

And certainly there never was a time when mercantile life was surrounded with more temptations than at the present moment. The sudden and violent change from a redundant to a deficient currency, has so disturbed the relation between debtor and creditor, has made the enforcement of contracts fraught with such enormous and palpable wrong, that justice seems quite as often to lie in the evasion as in the fulfilment of honest stipulations. But let those who are thus entangled remember, that commercial embarrassments are in their nature temporary, but principle is immutable and eternal. The onward progress of a country like this can never be permanently repressed. A fresh soil, an enterprising population, a high perfection of the arts, and an elevated tone of morality, are the elements of national greatness.

We are a world within ourselves, and every interruption of our foreign relations will only tend more rapidly to develop our internal resources. Our present troubles, like all human things, must at length pass away, and happy will he be who comes out of them with a strong heart and a clear conscience. The great processes of production and consumption must still go on, and while they are kept up, the merchant must always find employ

ment.

Business is a mighty, ever-flowing stream, and if its natural channels become obstructed, it will find another, and soon wear a smooth passage where at first all seems rough and rugged.

The hope of the patriot is, that the lessons of the last few years will not soon be forgotten. There is no teaching like that of bitter experience. Our nation is yet in its youth. It is now forming the chart of its future voyage on the sea of existence. It is to be hoped that it will set a beaconlight on the rocks on which it has wellnigh been wrecked. Things must at length settle down, a calm must succeed such elemental war, and we have every reason to hope that we shall have a season of prosperity as lasting and tranquil as our sufferings have been violent and protracted.

ART. III.-REMARKS ON "FREE TRADE."

THE article entitled "Free Trade," in the number of the Merchants' Magazine for March, seems to require some notice at the hands of the advocates of discriminating duties, of whom I am one. Embodying, as it does, all the plausible but often delusive commonplaces by which the interests of British manufacturers have hitherto been sustained in our own country, at the expense of the welfare of American farmers and artisans, it would be difficult to touch every point on which observation is desirable, without extending this article to an unacceptable length. Instead of answering it in detail, therefore, I shall endeavor to grapple with its principles, and show wherein they are at variance with the true interests of the country.

The writer wholly misstates, and, probably, misconceives the principles and views of the advocates of the protective policy. To prevent a recurrence of this misapprehension, let me briefly set forth the grounds on which we stand.

I. We who advocate protection maintain, that many a branch of industry for which the country is admirably adapted, may yet, in its infancy, and in the absence of information or experience with regard to it, and of proper implements and facilities for its prosecution, afford an inadequate reward of itself to those who engage in it, exposed to an unequal competi tion with the long-established, vastly productive, and prosperous rival interests of older countries. We hold that, in such cases, the government may often confer a vast benefit on the whole nation by extending to the struggling infant its fostering, protecting aid, by means of a discriminating duty on the importation of the foreign article. We insist that, though in such case the cost to the domestic consumer may for a short time be enhanced, yet it will very soon be reduced below the price at which it had 54

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