at the flood lead on to fortune." The merchant has, indeed, no Midas touch. The same course of trade which enriched one man to-day, may ruin another to-morrow. A few dollars, earned on a Commencement day, by ferrying passengers over Charles River when there was no bridge, shipped to Lisbon in the shape of fish, and from thence to London in the shape of fruit, and from thence brought home to be reinvested in fish, and to be reëntered upon the same triangular circuit of trade, laid the foundations of the largest fortune of the day, a hundred years ago. Yet many a man has plied a ferryboat over Charles River, before and since, and died without an obolus to discharge his own fare over the Styx. Great losses, as well as great gains, may await the best concerted schemes of foreign or domestic trade; and more of you, my young friends, will be called on to endure the reverses, than to improve the successes of mercantile life. It has been calculated, that out of every hundred persons who have engaged in mercantile business in our own city, not less than ninety-five have failed at least once, during a term of forty years. And noble examples are within the remembrance of us all, of the manner in which such reverses should be met; examples, which have recently shed a fresh lustre over the mercantile character of our city; examples, beneath whose brilliant light, it may be hoped that any spirit of fraud or concealment which may still be lurking in any breast within the reach of its rays, may be changed and purified, before the touch of misfortune shall have revealed it, and "Like the stained web, which whitens in the sun, But the remark is still true, Mr. President, that the great private fortunes of the country are to be hereafter, as they certainly have been heretofore, the fruit of successful commerce; and that the influences of accumulated wealth are to be wielded, in most cases, by members of the mercantile profession. Yes, gentlemen, in succeeding to the places of the merchants of Boston, you are to become responsible for the exercise of that vast social power, on which the comfort and happiness and prosperity and even bread of so many thousands of your fellow-citizens will depend. It will be yours, especially, to decide, whether that stream of public and private charity, which has so long made glad and glorious the city of our pride, shall flow on in its beauty and its strength for another generation; or whether it shall presently be absorbed in the stagnant pool of avarice, or be diverted into the even more poisonous channel of a profligate luxury. Well may you prepare yourselves for the discharge of this high responsibility. Well may we all take an interest in your preparation. Well may all good men aid and encourage you in your efforts to acquire those enlightened views, those enlarged and liberal sentiments, that refined and elevated intelligence, that strong, clear, deep sense of moral and religious obligation, which good books, and well-spent evenings, and grave deliberations, and able and eloquent discourses, are calculated to impart; which shall lead you to regard wealth as mainly valuable as an instrument of philanthropy; which shall teach you the unworthiness of all other luxury compared with the "luxury of doing good;" which shall enable you to catch, if possible, something of the spirit of that great Athenian philosopher- himself, as we are told, a merchant in his youth-who regarded the hoarded treasures and gorgeous trappings of a Monarch whose name has come down to us as the very synonyme of unbounded wealth, as not to be named in comparison either with the patriotism of a humble citizen, who lived for his children and died for his country, or with the piety of those heroic young men, who, rather than the religion of their country should lack any of its appointed rites, hesitated not to put their own necks to the yoke, and to drag their priestess mother a distance of five and forty stadia to the temple, only to lay down their exhausted lives at the foot of the altar, and to mingle their expiring breath with a mother's prayers, in one sweet sacrifice to the gods whom they ignorantly worshipped!* I pass, Mr. President and Gentlemen, from these local topics, to a brief consideration of the pursuits for which you are preparing, in their larger and more comprehensive relations. There are few more charming passages in ancient or modern history, than that in which Herodotus describes the interview between Solon and Croesus, and in which the philosopher, on being asked by the Monarch who was the most enviable person he had ever known, is represented as having named, first, Tellus the Athenian, and next, the young Cleobis and Biton. If one were called on to say, what, upon the whole, was the most distinctive and characterizing feature of the age in which we live, I think he might reply, that it was the rapid and steady progress of the influence of Commerce upon the social and political condition of man. The policy of the civilized world is now everywhere and eminently a commercial policy. No longer do the nations of the earth measure their relative consequence by the number and discipline of their armies upon the land, or their armadas upon the sea. The tables of their imports and exports, the tonnage of their commercial marines, the value and variety of their home trade, the sum total of their mercantile exchanges,these furnish the standards by which national power and national importance are now marked and measured. Even extent of territorial dominion is valued little, save as it gives scope and verge for mercantile transactions; and the great use of colonies is what Lord Sheffield declared it to be half a century ago," the monopoly of their consumption, and the carriage of their produce." Look to the domestic administration, or the foreign negotiation of our own, or any other civilized country. Listen to the debates of the two houses of the Imperial Parliament. What are the subjects of their gravest and most frequent discussions? The succession of families? The marriage of princes? The conquest of provinces? The balance of power?—No; the balance of trade, the sliding scale, corn, cotton, sugar, timber,—these furnish now the homespun threads upon which the statesmen of modern days are obliged to string the pearls of their parlia mentary rhetoric. Nay, the Prime Minister himself is heard discoursing upon the duties to be levied upon the seed of a certain savory vegetable-the use of which not even Parisian authority has rendered quite genteel upon a fair day-as gravely, as if it were as true in regard to the complaints against the tariff of Great Britain, as some of us think it is true in reference to the murmurs against our own American tariff, that "all the tears which should water this sorrow, live in an onion!" Cross over to the continent. What is the great fact of the day in that quarter? Lo, a convention of delegates from ten of the independent States of Germany, forgetting their old political - rivalries and social feuds, flinging to the winds all the fears and jealousies which have so long sown dragon's teeth along the borders of neighboring States of disproportioned strength and different forms of government, — the lamb lying down with the lion, the little city of Frankfort with the proud kingdom of Prussia,—and all entering into a solemn league to regulate commerce and secure markets! What occupies the thoughts of the diplomatists, the Guizots, and Aberdeens, and Metternichs? Reciprocal treaties of commerce and navigation; — treaties to advance an honest trade, or sometimes (I thank Heaven!) to abolish an infamous and accursed traffic;-these are the engrossing topics of their protocols and ultimatums. Even wars, when they have occurred, or when they have been rumored, for a quarter of a century past, how almost uniformly has the real motive, whether of the menace or of the hostile act, proved to be whatever may have been the pretence-not, as aforetime, to destroy, but to secure, the sources of commercial wealth. Algiers, Affghanistan, China, Texas, Oregon, all point more or less directly, to one and the same pervading policy throughout the world,the policy of opening new markets, securing new ports, and extending commerce and navigation over new lands and new seas. But, Mr. President, the most signal and most gratifying illustration of the predominating influence of commerce in the affairs of the world, is to be drawn not from the consideration of wars, but of peace. It is a common form of remark, that the protracted and general peace, which the world has of late enjoyed, has been the cause of that vast extension of commerce which is everywhere witnessed. And doubtless, there is much truth in the idea intended to be conveyed by it. Certainly, too, there has been, and always will be, much of action and reaction in these coinciding circumstances, and much to account for various readings in the assignment of cause and consequence. Yet I cannot but think that the time has at length fully come, when the mode of stating the relations between these great interests, should be changed; and when Commerce may fairly be considered as having substantiated its claim to that highest of all titles, the great Conservator of the world's peace, instead of being represented as a helpless dependent on peace for the liberty of prosecuting its own pursuits. Indeed, Commerce has, in all ages, been the most formidable antagonist of war. That great struggle for the mastery, which has been going on, almost from the earliest syllable of recorded time, upon the theatre of human life, and which has been variously described and denominated, according to the aspect in which it has been regarded, or the object with which it was discussed -now as a struggle between aristocracy and democracy, and now as between the few and the many- has been little more than a struggle between the mercantile and the martial spirit. For centuries, and cycles of centuries, the martial spirit has prevailed. The written history of the world is one long bloody record of its triumph. And it cannot have escaped any one, that, during the periods of its sternest struggles, it has singled out the commercial spirit as its most formidable foe. Look at ancient Sparta, for example; the state which, more than any other, was organized upon a purely war principle; though, to the credit of its founder be it spoken, with the view of defending its own territories, and not of encroaching upon the dominions of others. What was the first great stroke of policy adopted by the Lacedæmonian lawgiver to secure the supremacy of the martial spirit? What did he primarily aim to accomplish by his extraordinary enactments in relation to food, currency, education, honesty, and labor of all sorts? A Lacedæmonian happening to be at Athens when the court was sitting, was informed of a man who had just been fined for idle"Let me see the person," exclaimed he, "who has been condemned for keeping up his dignity!" What was the philosophy of the black broth, the iron money, the consummate virtue of successful theft, the sublime dignity of idleness? It was the war system, entrenching itself, where alone it could be safe, on the ruins of commerce! The annihilation of trade, and all its inducements, and all its incidents, the extermination of the mercantile spirit, root and branch, - this was the only mode which the sagacious Lycurgus could devise for maintaining the martial character of Sparta. ness. |