ment who was the best man in the city. And it is no small tribute to the Roman virtue of that day, that all men are said to have been more ambitious to get the victory in that dispute, than if they had stood to be elected to the highest and most lucrative offices and honors within the gift of the Senate or the people. The Senate at last selected PUBLIUS SCIPIO; of whom the only record is, that he was the nephew of Cneus, who was killed in Spain, and that he was a young man, who had never attained to that lowest of all the public honors of the empire, for which it was only necessary for him to have reached the age of two-and-twenty years. We may admire - we must admire -the resistless energy, the matchless heroism, of those two thunderbolts of war - Scipio, the conqueror of Hannibal, and Scipio, the destroyer of Carthage. But who does not feel that this little story has thrown around that name a halo of peerless brilliancy; yes, one Which shall new lustre boast, When victors' wreaths and monarchs' gems But I proposed to speak of your Institution in its relations rather to the future pursuits, than to the present circumstances, of those of whom it is composed. I see before me and around me, as its members, the future merchants of Boston; those, who in the progress of time, are to take the places of the intelligent, the enterprising, the wealthy and honorable men, who now carry on the vast foreign and domestic trade of this great commercial emporium. To take the places which have been filled by the past and present merchants of Boston! How much, Mr. President, is included in this idea! How much of solemn responsibility for you and your associates; how much of deep concern and momentous import to the prosperity and honor of our beloved city! Let us pause, before passing to less local and limited views, and reflect for a few moments on the influence which has been exerted by commerce, and by those who have been engaged in commerce, on the fortunes and character of the pleasant place, in which we all thank God this night and every night of our lives, I trust, that our lots have been cast. The site of our City seems originally to have been selected with no particular reference to commercial advantages. Other thoughts than those of trade engrossed the attention of the first settlers of Boston. They sought security from the mingled political and ecclesiastical oppressions of the old world, and a refuge for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty. These they could find nowhere but in the wilderness of this new Hemisphere; but having sought them and found them here, all other matters were, at the outset, certainly, comparatively indifferent to them. On what precise spot of this vast solitude,-" all before them, where to choose," they should plant themselves, mattered little, save as their immediate safety and sustenance and quiet might be affected; and by these considerations, far more than by any larger views of future advantage or aggrandizement to themselves or their posterity, they seem to have been governed in the selection of that spot. They desired safety from the assaults of merciless savages. Hence they would not go far into the interior, where they might be surrounded and cut off. They desired to be as near as three thousand miles of perilous and pitiless ocean would allow them to be, to the dear friends and families from whom they had just been sadly separated in England; to be where they could readily receive and welcome and embrace those who might still be moved to come over and join them, and where they might hear as often and as early as possible from those who might continue to stay behind. The many necessities of food and clothing, too, which must still be supplied them from abroad, would add a yet stronger link to the considerations which thus chained them to the coast. There were some necessaries of life, however, which must be furnished on the spot, or not at all. One of these was fresh water to drink. And strange as it strikes us in these days, when it would seem impossible - nay, when it is impossible for the thirst of our people to be palatably or wholesomely slaked from day to day, unless Long Pond, or Spot Pond, or Charles River, be brought bodily into our midst, and when we are likely to suffer the tortures of Tantalus until conflicting interests and discordant opinions have fought themselves into a state of recon ciliation or compromise, - strange, I say, as it appears at such a moment, it was the fresh water, and not the salt water, advantages of the situation, which determined the locality of our city. "An excellent spring of water" is recorded and I cannot but wish that it still existed somewhere else than on the ancient records as among the most prominent causes for planting Boston upon this peninsula; while not a word is said of yonder capacious and noble harbor. Other views, more or less capricious, entered into the choice of a location. "Governor Winthrop, (we are informed by Captain Clap,) purposed to set down his station about Cambridge, or somewhere on the river; but viewing the place, he liked that plain neck, that was then called Blackstone's neck." And Wood, in his New England Prospect, would seem to imply that our fathers might have been influenced by their desire to obtain security from other foes besides the Indians, when he enumerates, with so felicitous an example of the climax, among the principal recommendations of this "plain neck," its singular exemption from those three great annoyances, "wolves, rattlesnakes, and mosquitos!" At any rate, the idea of founding a great commercial metropolis was not in all the thoughts of the first planters of Boston. And yet within a very few years from its original settlement the commercial destiny of the place was shaped and determined. Indeed, I can hardly consider as any thing less than a clear foreshadowing of that destiny,-if rather it were not the first step in its fulfilment, — the building and launching on the Mystic river, by Governor Winthrop himself, in 1631, within one year from the day from which the existence of our city bears date, of the first Boston vessel. A little bark of only thirty tons though it was, yet called the Blessing of the Bay, and launched on the fourth day of July, it seems a beautiful archetype of those countless blessings of the Bay, which were to be witnessed and enjoyed here, when the commerce of Boston should have had time to establish and expand itself, and when another and more memorable, far distant but even then inevitable and almost foreseen, Fourth of July, should have thrown over that commerce, never, I trust, to be furled or rent in twain, the glorious banner of a free, independent, and united Republic! Certainly, Gentlemen, almost from that early day, the history of the rise and progress of our city is the history of the rise and progress of its commerce. For the first few years, indeed, the trade of the place was confined principally to a little barter with the natives for furs and skins. And for some years afterwards, the records of mere mercantile transactions are overlaid by the more important registration of the establishment of towns and churches and schools, of fundamental laws, and the tribunals for their administration and execution. As early as 1633, however, we find mention of the building of another ship of twice the burden of the first; and in 1634 we hear of John Cogan setting up the first shop on the peninsula, who thus, perhaps, may be entitled to be remembered as the first Boston merchant. In 1639, we learn that the ship-builders and fishermen of this and the neighboring settlements of the colony, had become so numerous and of such importance in the estimation of the people, as to be made the subject of a special exemption from what our fathers, in their ignorant simplicity, considered as among the most imperative of their civil and Christian duties —.military trainings. And in the same year, we catch another most interesting glimpse of the operations of our growing trade, in a complaint solemnly considered by the General Court, against alleged oppression in the sale of foreign commodities; when Mr. Robert Keayne, who kept a shop in Boston,-(who will be remembered, perhaps, as the first commander of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, and who has secured for himself a less enviable notoriety as the author of a Will which occupies no less than one hundred and fifty-seven pages on our Probate records,) having been convicted of taking in some cases above sixpence in the shilling profit, in some above eight-pence, and in some small things above two for one, was adjudged to pay a penalty of two hundred dollars! On this occasion, the Church, as well as the State, has left record of its views of commercial matters. Not only was Captain Keayne subjected to the censure of the ecclesiastical synod, but Mr. Cotton, the ever-honored pastor from whose residence at Boston, in Lincolnshire, our city derived its name, laid open in the most solemn form, on the next lecture day, the error of the principles upon which Captain Keayne had attempted to justify his extortion, and gave sundry special directions for the conscientious conducting of mercantile business. The most important principle of commercial dealing which was condemned from the pulpit on that occasion as false, was, "that a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he can ;" while it was prescribed as one of the positive rules of trade, that "where a man loseth by casualty of sea, it is a loss cast upon himself by Providence, and he may not ease himself by casting it on another; for so a man should seem to provide against all providences, so that he should never lose." The first of the preacher's doctrines soon after received a practical illustration and enforcement, in the case of a mechanic, who for asking an excessive price for a pair of stocks which he had been hired to frame for the purposes of justice, had the honor to sit in them the first hour himself! I need not say, Mr. President, that it could not have been by 'recking the rede' of that day's lecture, that the commerce of Boston continued to advance. But most rapid progress it certainly made, as we find ample evidence in the facts, that before the year 1645, more than two hundred years ago, a ship of over 400 tons was no stranger to our shipwrights; and that in the course of this single year we hear of the arrival of twelve or fourteen large ships bringing stores of linens, woollens and other commodities from London, and carrying back in part payment, more than 20,000 bushels of corn. Concurrent testimony is found, also, in the quaint but significant expressions of Edward Johnson, who tells us, in his Wonder-Working Providence, that our maritan towns began to increase roundly, especially Boston, the which of a poor country village, in twice seven years is become like unto a small city, and is in election to become mayor town suddenly, chiefly increased by trade by sea." I may not take up more time in describing the gradual stages by which our city has advanced to the condition in which we now find it. Nor is any such description necessary to substantiate the well-understood fact, that in all periods of its history, commerce has been the grand and leading element of its prosperity |