THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE.

AN ADDRESS, DELIVERED BEFORE THE BOSTON MERCANTILE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, ON THE OCCASION OF THEIR TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY, OCTOBER 15, 1845.

MR. PRESIDENT and Gentlemen of the Mercantile LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, —

I AM greatly honored by the part which you have assigned me on this occasion, and by thus being permitted to add my name to the list of distinguished persons who have addressed you at your anniversary celebrations. John Davis, George Putnam, Rufus Choate, Edward Everett, I need name no more of them to justify me in saying, that any one may feel proud at being called on to follow in such footsteps. I need name no more of them, certainly, to warrant me in adding, that no one can fail to feel some touches, also, of a less welcome and less inspiriting emotion than that of pride, as he finds himself rising to tread in such tracks, and begins to realize, by something of a practical experiment, the full measure of the strides before him. It is grateful to remember at such a moment, that I am any thing but a volunteer in your service, and that there are those present who can bear witness, how gladly I would have been excused again, as more than once in years past, from encountering its perilous contrasts. And now, in complying at last with your kind solicitations, I propose to enter upon no labored discussion of formal topics, but rather conforming myself to the spirit of an anniversary and an introductory address, as well as to what I understand to be your own expectations and wishes this evening, to find the subject of my remarks in the circum

stances of the occasion, and in the character of the institution before me.

You have arrived, Gentlemen, at a marked epoch in your history. You are assembled to commemorate your Twenty-Fifth Anniversary. A quarter of a century has passed away since, at a little meeting held at the Commercial Coffee House in this city, under the lead of a gentleman, whose name has been honorably connected with more than one of our most valued institutions, as well as with repeated terms of popular and efficient administration of the chief magistracy of our city, (Mr. Theodore Lyman,) your association took its rise. Your progress was for many years slow. The excellent report of your last board of directors exhibits a record of early trials and struggles, such as no institution, not founded upon the rock of true principle and real merit, could have survived. It points, indeed, to more than one period in your history, when you found it all but impossible to maintain your organization, and when you had little more than a name to live. The persevering energy of some of your early members, however, has not been unrewarded in the end. Within a few years past all obstacles to your advancement have been overcome. Large additions have been made to your funds, to your library, and to your numbers, now amounting to nearly eight hundred; and you have given a fresh pledge, within a few months past, that your institution shall be sustained and perpetuated, by asking and accepting a charter from the Commonwealth. At the close, then, of a quarter of a century since the date of your original organization, you have assembled here to-night, in the enjoyment of every circumstance, both of prosperity for the present and of hope for the future, and in the presence of this crowded company of patrons and friends, to celebrate your first anniversary as an incorporated association.

I congratulate you, gentlemen, most cordially on this consummation. I congratulate this community, that your association has outlived the discouragements and embarrassments of its infancy, and has at length taken its place among the public and permanent institutions of our city. A legislative charter has of itself, indeed, added little to your claims to consideration. In

some quarters, it may rather be thought to have rendered you an object of suspicion, jealousy, and odium; though I think it would puzzle the sturdiest decrier of corporations to put his finger upon the clause in your charter, which clothes you with powers formidable to any thing, but idleness, ignorance, and vice. But it has certainly furnished you with facilities for selfgovernment, and for the management and transmission of property, and for setting a just limit to the responsibility of your members, and for securing a just accountability for the bounty of your benefactors, which cannot fail to exert a most auspicious influence on your future condition and progress. And may it not be hoped, as among its incidental advantages, that it may have armed you thus early against prejudices, which may, at any time or under any influences, seek to get possession of your minds, in reference to a species of social machinery, which has been, in my judgment, more potent than power-loom or steam-engine, in advancing the best interests of society? May it not be hoped, that your early enlistment in the ranks of a chartered company, may impress you indelibly with the true idea, that though, according to the musty and moth-eaten maxim of the law, corporations may have no souls, those who constitute them have; and that they are entitled to be judged, in their corporate as well as in their individual capacity, by their designs, their objects, and their acts?

Your designs, Mr. President and Gentlemen, are inscribed, in brief but comprehensive terms, on the face of your charter. You have been made a corporation "for the purpose of diffusing and promoting knowledge among young men, (including all from fourteen years of age upwards,) now engaged in, or destined for, the mercantile profession;" and while you are faithful to such ends, you cannot fail to meet with the respect, the encouragement, the cordial approbation and support of all good men. For myself, certainly, in whatever light I look at such an association, whether in regard to the present circumstances or the future pursuits of those who compose it, its interest and importance seem hardly susceptible of exaggeration.

I see in it, in the first place, an instrument of unspeakable profit and preservation - intellectual profit and moral preserva

tion — to vast numbers of young men, who in successive years shall be enrolled among its members. I see gathered nightly in its halls, within well-stored alcoves, and around tables spread with whatever can nourish the intellect or stimulate the soul of man — a feast" which, after, no repenting draws"- those who might otherwise be led away by the temptations of profligacy or crime. The fresh and unstained country boy, sent out in the first flush of his young heart from the parental home, to encounter the contaminations of a great city as he may, with a hope which has no horizon short of gaining the whole world, but without a thought of the peril of losing his own soul; the young lad of yet sadder fortune, to whom, in the providence of God, there remains no parental home, no precious influence of a father's or a mother's eye, beneath which he may shelter himself after the toil of to-day is over, and gather fresh strength for the trials and temptations of to-morrow; and those whom a hundred other nameless peculiarities of condition or of temperament may render the ready victims of the snares that lie concealed, or of the pitfalls that gape openly, at the corners of every street of a crowded metropolis like this;- I see them all, not merely drawn off from their exposure to evil, but provided with the means of innocent recreation and valuable improvement.

If there be a class of institutions more important than any or all others, to the moral character of our community, it is that which furnishes entertainment and employment during the evenings the long winter, and the short summer evenings, too— for young men; and more especially for those, who either have no homes to which they may resort, or for whom the influences of the paternal roof have been in any way paralyzed. Libraries and reading-rooms for the merchants' clerks and the mechanics' apprentices of our city, numerous enough and spacious enough to accommodate them all, and furnished with every temptation which the amplest endowments can supply; — these are among the most effective instruments which can be devised, for advancing our highest moral and social interests, and are entitled to the most liberal encouragement of all true philanthropists. It is not enough, that the tippling-shops and gambling-tables are broken up. There is mischief still for idle

minds to devise, and for idle hands to do. Innocent entertainment and useful occupation must be supplied, and supplied with some circumstance of interest and attraction and fascination, if possible, or you have only driven dissipation and vice from the public haunt to the private hiding place, where they will lose nothing of their grossness or their guilt, by losing all their apprehension of exposure. And when the cheering spectacle is exhibited of the young men of the city, associating themselves for this great end of their own self-defence; organizing themselves, not into a company, like that recently instituted by the merchants' clerks of London, for making up to their employers out of a common stock, the losses which may result from their own annual, ascertained, average of fraud and roguery, but into a company to insure themselves against the vices and immoralities and idleness from which those losses and those frauds flow as from their fountain, what heart can refuse them its sincerest sympathy, what tongue its most encouraging word, what hand its most efficient aid!

If there be an appeal for sympathy and encouragement which no patriotic or philanthropic breast can resist, it is that of young men struggling against the temptations which beset their path, and striving to prepare themselves, intellectually and morally, for discharging the duties which are about to devolve on their maturer life. And if there be a spectacle calculated to fill every such breast with joy, and to reward a thousand-fold those who may have contributed in any way to the result, it is that of young men who have thus striven and struggled with success. There is a name in history. It is associated with some of the proudest achievements of the proudest empire in the world. It has been shouted along the chariot ways of imperial Rome on occasions of her most magnificent triumphs. Whole volumes have been filled with the brilliant acts which have illustrated that name in three successive generations. But there is a little incident which takes up hardly ten lines on the historic page, which has invested it with a charm higher and nobler than all these. The Sybils, we are told, had prophesied that the Bona Dea should be introduced into Rome by the best man among the Romans. The Senate was accordingly busied to pass judg