was banished from Eden, must be regarded as
much more wonderful. If we read the mottoes
that are inscribed on boxes of lucifer-matches,
it will be evident that in the opinion of the
manufacturers it is still more difficult to find
parallel to their performances, for we must go
back to the creation of the world, when the
Almighty said, "Let there be light, and there
was light." So I might go on mentioning all
sorts of things, from the railroad and the
telegraph, which have annihilated space and time,
to the pannus corium, which has abolished
corns, and to the stove which has the glory of
being smokeless; but in enumerating all these
novelties, great and small, a greater than any of
them would most likely be forgotten, because of
the silence and the slowness of its growth. Up
to a very late period it was thought that there
was something despicable in trade. It was not
for a gentleman to engage in trade. Traders
accepted the position, and felt that there was
something mean in their occupation. Lord
Stanhope tells us, that in the last century it
was understood in Scotland that the only
business in which a gentleman could be
employed was that of a wine-merchant. The
selection and distribution of wines was a
matter of such overwhelming importance in
those drinking days, that this, and this alone,
in the way of merchandise, could deserve the
attention of any one who claimed to be well
born. All through history, we find the
merchant regarded in the same way as a low fellow,
actuated by selfish motives, and always enriching
himself at the expense of his customers.
In the middle of the last century, men began to
study trade for the first time as a science, and
not until that science was perfected and
universally accredited, was the true dignity of the
merchant's calling understood. Then it
appeared that if trade were good for the merchant,
it was even better for the customer; that if
it made private fortunes, it also performed a
public service; that if it were attractive to
individuals, it was also essential to the state. It
was a grand thing for the merchant to have the
stigma of selfishness removed from his name;
it was a grand thing for him to feel that he was
no grasping wretch engaged only in serving
himself, but that, doing his duty over his ledgers,
he was as much a philanthropist, a patriot, and
a gentleman, as if he were born to harangue in
parliament, or educated to write for posterity.

There is no more striking revolution in
the whole history of human affairs than this
by which mercantile questions have ceased to
be purely mercantile, and are regarded not
less as moral and political. We laugh at the
magniloquent advertisements in which some
small invention is described as pregnant with
the mightiest results for the regeneration of the
world; but, perhaps, we would laugh less if,
behind all the farce and puffery of advertising, we
saw the moral interests that are really involved
—if we saw that besides the twopence-halfpenny
of profit which the trader is anxious to make
out of his trifling improvement, he is really
bent on doing a service to the public, and is
able to do it. In the last few years we have
engaged in public works of prodigious magnitude,
that have moved the world, and given a
new character to civilisation. Is it by the
simple leverage of a five or ten per cent. profit
that we have been induced to embark in these
undertakings? Not so. There is a romance
as well as profit in them. Imagination is the
strongest faculty in man, and we have been
carried away by the love of perfection and the
delight in enterprise, even more than by the
hope of gain. Trade is now-a-days more than
trade. It is a weapon of enormous power—it
is enterprise in which the mightiest issues are
at stake—it is a science of such vast importance
that he who can best expound it becomes
naturally the dominating minister of the greatest
nations. It is perfectly well known on both
sides of the Atlantic that trade has rendered a
war between this country and the United States
of America an impossibility. We have become
necessary to each other's existence, and in this
way trade has been able to produce a moral
effect which our kindred origin, our mother
tongue, our similar institutions, and our mutual
admiration, have not of themselves been able to
ensure. It is now suggested that more
intimate commercial dealings with France may have
the like effect, in consolidating an alliance
between the two countries, and making us, who
have been eternal enemies, eternal friends. To
any one who has the slightest acquaintance with
history and with the political philosophy of our
fathers, the novelty and strangeness of such a
proposal will be apparent. The merchant
elevated into a diplomatist, and the argosy substituted
for the man-of-war—in every past age of
the world such an idea would have been laughed
to scorn. So little is a policy in which mercantile
considerations are involved, understood to this
day on the Continent, that we are still described,
in the phrase of Napoleon, as a nation of shop-
keepers, and people cannot see that there is
anything more in it than a sordid devotion to
money.

The fallacy which lies at the root of all our
old contempt for trade and our present distrust
of free trade—the fallacy which infects the
reasoning of all those Frenchmen who declare that
France is going to be ruined because the
emperor is to release the restrictions upon its trade
and to abolish the absurd prohibitions that have
hitherto prevented Monsieur from purchasing
English manufactures—is this, that the profit of
the seller is a loss to the buyer. If I sell tea,
and get a shilling of profit on every pound that
I dispose of, that shilling must come out of my
customer's pocket, and he thinks it rather hard
that if the tea costs me no more than three
shillings and sixpence it should cost him four
shillings and sixpence. I rob him of a shilling.
He does not ask whether the article which I sell
is worth the money. He simply sees that I
make more in the way of profit than covers the
necessary expenses of my business, and he
grudges me that little bait which induces me to