and progress. Indeed, if there were no historical records to appeal to, it would require but a glance at Boston as it was, to convince any one, that nothing but the most judicious, enterprising, and fortunate improvement of commercial advantages could have made it what it is. What but Commerce, gathering about itself those mechanic arts which are its indispensable and honored handmaids, could have converted into such a crowded scene of life and labor as we see around us, that old plain neck, which was but six hundred acres in extent, when it was purchased of William Blackstone for thirty pounds, and which even now, when as many more acres have been redeemed from the sea and added to its dimensions, is still hardly larger than an ordinary Western farm! Agriculture, it is plain, could have found no elbow-room for swinging a scythe here; while as to maufactures, the only motive power to turn a spinning-wheel, within the reach or the knowledge of our fathers, was one, which, without any disparagement to its magic influence either in that day or this, whether in a glass slipper or a prunella boot, could scarcely have rocked out the destiny of a great city.

There is little risk in asserting, though I have not been able precisely to verify the fact, that in territorial dimensions, Boston is one of the very smallest incorporated cities in the world. In the order of population, there are nearly a hundred cities which stand before it. What place it holds on the scale of intelligence and influence and reputation and honor at home and abroad, it may not become us to pronounce. It is a city set on a hill yes, on three hills; it cannot be hid. Let others praise us and not our own mouths,― strangers, and not our own lips. Yet we may not shut our eyes to the fact, that in view of its mercantile relations, it is already the second city on the American continent, and hardly below the fourth, certainly not below the fifth, on the face of the globe. Nor may we be blind to the operation of commercial causes, which, if not frustrated by want of intelligence and enterprise, seem to promise, that the rapidity of its progress in time past, shall bear but the same proportion to that in time to come, which the velocity of the creaking and trundling wagons which were so lately its only vehicles of inland transportation, bears to that of the gigantic enginery, which is

now shooting along our highways at every hour of the day and from every quarter of the compass, with a whistle like that of Roderick Dhu, and with a tramp heavier than that of any host of armed men which that whistle ever mustered either to the feast or to the fray!

In preparing yourselves, then, Mr. President and Gentlemen, to take the places of the merchants of Boston, you are preparing yourselves to carry on that great business which has made our city almost all that it is, and which must make it all that it is to be. Upon your intelligence and information, upon your energy and enterprise, upon your integrity and honor, it will in no small degree, under God, depend,-whether its course shall still be onward and upward, or whether, when the present generation shall have passed away, it shall begin to follow the fortunes of other commercial cities, once the renowned of the world, whose merchants were princes and their traffickers the honorable of the earth, but which have now a name and a place only in history.

But I have alluded thus far, Mr. President, to the least and most inconsiderable part of what is implied in the idea of taking the places of the past and present merchants of Boston. You are to take their places not merely as merchants, but as men; not merely in conducting commerce, but in sustaining character; not merely in accumulating the aggregate wealth which is to swell the importance of Boston in the columns of a statistical table, but in the possession and use of that individual wealth of which this aggregate is made up, and on the manner of whose employment the truest glory of our city must always in so great a degree depend. What has given us our noblest distinction as a community in time past? To what page of our history do we point with the liveliest and justest pride? By what record would we be most willing to be judged this night, of men or of angels? That, beyond all question, which contains the account current of our public and private charities. That, beyond all question, so recently and admirably summed up by a late distinguished mayor of our city, (Mr. Eliot,) which exhibits the long catalogue of those munificent donations by

which the great interests of education, morality, and religion have been sustained and promoted at home and abroad; by which almost every want of suffering humanity is supplied or alleviated; by which, in all but the miraculous sense which may be attributed to God alone, the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the deaf hear, and the poor have the gospel preached unto them.

And from whence has this munificence proceeded? From whom have these princely endowments come? To what profession or calling in life belonged, or still belong, the great majority of those whose names are inscribed on so many of our halls and hospitals and asylums and athenæums and chapels, — on the professorships of our colleges, the lectures of our institutes, the prizes of our common schools? Who was that PETER FANEUIL, whose name is written where it will be remembered, if not as long as the sun and the moon shall endure, yet certainly as long as a single star of our own constellation shall be left, to guide the worshippers of American liberty to its cradle? Who were John McLean, Samuel Eliot, James Perkins, Israel Thorndike, Samuel Parkman, John Lowell, Jr., John Parker, Benjamin Bussey, Israel Munson, and a host of others among the dead? I may not violate the proprieties of such an occasion, by asking in what profession are enrolled the names of men no less distinguished by their munificence, but still living in our midst, and some of them present here with us to-night. Yet you would not forgive me, gentlemen, nor could I excuse it to myself, were I to omit a more distinct allusion to the latest and largest benefactor of your own association; one, whose liberality within the past year has more than doubled your pecuniary resources; one, by whose encouragement you are now cherishing the hope, that those resources may soon be relieved from the exhausting load of a large annual rent, and that no distant day may find you engaged, as your sister association of Philadelphia has but now been, in dedicating a hall of your own. THOMAS HANDASYD PERKINS, however, I need not say, depends on no acts of liberality or words of encouragement to this association, for his title to the affection and admiration of us all. To a long life of unsurpassed commercial enterprise and honor, he has

seemed to add a second life of equally unsurpassed benevolence and munificence.

"For his bounty,

There is no winter in 't; an autumn 'tis

That grows the more by reaping."

You will all join me in wishing, that he may have a safe and speedy voyage on his return to his native land; and that he may still live long to enjoy the respect and veneration he has so richly earned.

I would not be understood, Mr. President, in any spirit of indiscriminate eulogy, to ascribe to the merchants of Boston, past, present, or to come, an undivided and exclusive possession of that most excellent gift of charity. They would scorn to lay claim to any monopoly of benevolence. The charity of the heart, they remember, as we all do, is not to be measured by moneyed contributions. They do not forget who pronounced the widow's mite to be more than all the gifts of the rich men. They do not forget where it is implied, that a man may bestow all his goods to feed the poor, yet have not charity. They would be the last to deny that their brethren of all other occupations, and their sisters too, have contributed, always according to their means, to every object which has justly appealed to the general sympathy and succor. But we all know, that the full hand must be united with the generous heart, that an ample fortune must be combined with benevolent impulses, for the accomplishment of those signal acts of humanity which have given a character to our community. And for this union of disposition and ability, for this rare combination of wealth and will, it seems plain to me, that we must look in time to come, as we have done in time past, to the successful merchants of our city.

Indeed, whether we are to judge by the experience of the past, or by the nature of things, it may be safely said, that the great private fortunes of our country are to be almost entirely the fruit of mercantile enterprise. Agriculture may always look with confidence for an honorable remuneration for its toils. It may thank God, that to it has been granted the blessing for

which the pious man prayed, neither poverty nor riches. It may read, we may all read, something more and better than a curse, in the doom which has declared to the tiller of the soil"in the sweat of thy brow, thou shalt eat bread." The honest yeoman of our land, indeed, can find no fitter terms for his song of joy, as he goes forth to his labor in the morning, or plods his wearier way homeward at night, than those well-remembered words of Poor Richard:

"He that by the plough would thrive,
Himself must either hold or drive."

He may rejoice-we may all rejoice, that so little temptation is held out to accumulated capital to turn to agriculture for profit; to add acre to acre, and field to field, for mere investment; and thus to break up that system of small, subdivided proprietorship, which constitutes at once the true independence of our farmers, and the best security for our freedom.

The Mechanic Arts will not fail of "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work," as long as our government shall not repudiate one of its great original debts, by being false to the protection of its own industry.

The larger Manufactures of modern times, may, for a few years longer, now and then, by fits and starts, make dividends large enough to be a nine days' wonder, and to provoke the jealousy of those who can see nothing but their own losses in other people's gains, or who do not scruple to avow a deeper interest in the welfare of Old England, than of New,- of Manchester and Liverpool, than of Boston and Lowell. But when once permanently established, and placed beyond the peradventure of Presidential elections and Congressional majorities, the common laws of supply and demand, and the levelling influences of an unrestricted domestic competition, will leave little margin in the balance of their accounts, for the notes of exclamation either of envy or of wonder.

To commercial pursuits alone, seem to belong permanently those elements of enterprise, adventure, and speculation, which furnish opportunities for great gains, those tides, "which taken