of the monarch, sending out his ships from Ezion-geber to Ophir, on the one hand, and trafficking with the numerous caravans which kept up an active land commerce on the other. When we come to the Bible descriptions of Tyre, we find ourselves, as it were, suddenly transported into an Eastern bazaar, where are gathered all Oriental commodities, nations, languages, and crimes. This city, which Ezekiel calls " a merchant of the people for many isles," was finely situated for trade at the head of the Mediterranean, and was at one time the commercial center of the world, having raised herself by her fleets and her caravans to be mistress of the sea. Indeed, we could not obtain a better inventory of ancient merchandise than that recorded in the 27th chapter of Ezekiel. Each of the surrounding nations is there represented as a merchant, bringing its peculiar productions to the warehouses of Tyre. Tarshish traded there with silver, iron, tin, and lead; Javan, with slaves and vessels of brass; Togarmah, in horses and mules; Dedan, in ivory and ebony; Syria, in emeralds, purple, broidered work, and fine linen; Judah, in wheat, and honey, and oil, and balm; Damascus, in the wine of Helbon and white wool-in fact, the chapter is an invoice of the merchandise of Tyre, at a time when it arrogated to itself the title of "Queen of Cities." Well may Isaiah say of Tyre, that it is "the crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honorable of the earth." Babylon, "the glory of kingdoms," "the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency," is styled by the prophet "a city of merchants." Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, that "exceeding great city," whose glory had set, ere that of Rome rose on the horizon; whose name even was forgotten when the memorable ten thousand, whose retreat from Cunaxa, 400 B. C., is celebrated in the Anabasis of Xenephon, passed over the plain on which it once stood; and whose remains, intombed over twenty-five centuries, have been recently disinterred by Botta and Layard, is said by the Prophet Nahum to have "multiplied its merchants above the stars of heaven." I need not pause to tell you how early merchants figured in the annals of Egypt, and Greece, and Rome, and Carthage, for I have already carried you back before their day, and linked your mercantile genealogy with the wealthiest, the greatest, and the oldest cities of the world. 2. Merchants are a potential class. The three leading elements of mercantile power are mind, money, union. Where these exist, there is might; where these are exercised, there is success. Merchants, as a body, have each. They are a highly intellectual class, because their minds are stimulated to active thought, and brought in contact with varying influences, and made to meditate large designs. They are a moneyed class, for they hold the purse-strings of the nations-they control the sinews of war; and the temple of Janus opens or shuts its doors at the bidding of the priests of the temple of Mammon. They are a united class-united by law, by legislation, by oneness of interest, by harmony of pursuit-so that no class of men present on all important issues a more united front than does the merchant. When, then, we find a body of men who control the commerce of the world, who regulate the currency of the world, who are the factors of the industry of the world, and the purveyors for all the artificial wants of the world, we cannot but declare that they are indeed potential. History proves the truth of this assertion. When Themistocles wished to make the Athenians great, he sought to do it through the extension of their commerce, for he held the proposition which Pompey afterwards adopted, "that the people who were masters of the sea would be masters of the world." 978 At one time, indeed, the merchant was but little respected; for both at Athens and Thebes, any one who had sold in the market within ten years was not allowed to take part in the government.t Yet Plutarch tells us that Solon and Thales, two of the seven wise men of Greece, were engaged in merchandise; that Hippocrates had his share in commerce, and that Plato, "the divine Plato,” as he has been called, trafficked in oil in Egypt, and thereby paid the expenses of his foreign travel. Grecian pride, boastful rather of its philosophy and its art than of its trade and navigation, was disposed to undervalue the merchant; but it was the merchant, not letters, who carried the Grecian name farther than the conquests of Alexander; and the stability and universality of the Grecian tongue, the language not only of Homer, and Plato, and Demosthenes, but the language of the Septuagint, of Paul, of Chrysostom, "are essentially to be imputed to the commercial genius of the people, to the colonies and factories which they established, and the trade and commerce which they maintained with all parts of the then known world."§ The patricians of Rome, like the aristocracy of Greece, affected to look down upon the merchant. Their military spirit and their lust of conquest frowned upon peaceful trade, and their code, therefore, prohibited commerce to persons of birth, rank, or fortune. But their increasing necessities, foreign alliances, and thirst for wealth, which they saw ever following the track of commerce, changed their views, and, despite the language of Cicero, who regarded merchandising as "inconsistent with the dignity of the masters of the world," we find Cato abandoning agriculture for trade, and Crassus investing some of his enormous wealth in commerce. Here let me ask, in connection with the power of merchants, whence originated the Lex Mercatoria, or what jurists call the Law Merchant, made up of "the customs of merchants, the ordinances of foreign States, and the statute law;" or, in other words, commercial or maritime law! We trace it back through the ordinances of the Hanseatic League, the Laws of Wisby, the Code of Oleron, the Consolato del Mare, and the Pandects of Justinian, to the merchants of Rhodes, who "were the earliest people," says Chancellor Kent, "that actually created, digested, and promulgated a system of marine law."** Thus the enterprise, justice, and intelligence of the Rhodian merchants, occupying a little island in the Grecian Archipelago, only about one-third the size of our American Rhode Island, not only gained for them the sovereignty of the seas, 700 years before Christ, but enabled them to give to the commercial world of all future time the germ of its maritime law; for "the Rhodian Statutes are truly," as Valin has observed, "the cradle of nautical jurisprudence." The revival of learning in the fourteenth century, and the discovery of America in the fifteenth-the one unfettering the long-shackled mind of • Kent's Commentaries on American Law, iii., 2. Life of Solon, i. 168. Oratio in Verrem. + Becker's Charicles, 281. 8 Kent's Com. iii., 3. Levi's Manual of Mercantile Law, 24. Kent's Com. iii., 3. Europe, and the other giving to it the white wings of commerce wherewith to transport itself to a new world-operated as a most powerful stimulant to the maritime countries of Europe, and gave to the merchant a high and commanding position. It was the "merchant adventurers" who made Venice, and Genoa, and Leghorn, and Florence, the controlling cities of the Mediterranean Sea during the Middle Ages, so that Voltaire could say that Italy, in the sixteenth century, owed her wealth entirely to commerce. Gracefully did Venice, "a glorious city in the sea," indicate the source of its greatness when, on the return of each Ascension Day, the Doge, dressed in gorgeous robes, attended by the Senate, and surrounded with the insignia of civic power, was rowed out to sea "in the gloriously painted, carved, and gilded Bucentaur," and, after priestly prayer and blessing, dropped from the bow of the galley a gold ring and cup into the water, in token that he had married Venice to the Adriatic. Well might Venice wed the sea, for at one time she had 3,000 vessels -as many as all the rest of Christendom beside-sailing under her flag. It was Venice, indeed, which, like an elder and retiring merchant, took young England by the hand, in the commercial treaty with Edward II., in 1325, and introduced her to the commerce of the world. What a suggestive scene! The lion of St. Mark, which once "Did hold the gorgeous East in fee, And was the safeguard of the West," inducting the lion of St. George to the guardianship of that ocean which was soon to be wrested from Venetian rule; for while St. Mark yet sees his lion where he stood, Stand, but in mockery of his withered power," England's lion is now rampant over the ocean world. Florence rose into commercial greatness and literary glory under her "Merchant Dukes," the founders of the Medici family, who, while filling the earth with the fame of its members-as Popes, and sovereigns, and princes-were still, in the persons of Cosmo, Lorenzo the Magnificent, (father of Pope Leo X., and grandfather of Clement VII.,) Francis, Ferdinand, and Cosmo II., actively engaged in commerce. Most elegantly has an English merchant, Roscoe, drawn the history of these princes in his Life of Lorenzo de Medici; while over this same Florence, where, "Girt by her theater of hills, Along the banks where smiling Arno sweeps, another merchant has thrown the charm of poetry, so pure, so classic, so beautiful, that as long as the city itself lasts, will the "Italy" of Rogers tell us that, "Of all the fairest cities of the earth, None is so fair as Florence." It was to merchants that Germany and the Netherlands were indebted * Age of Louis XIV. + Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, Esq., edited by Wm. Bray. Lond., i., 197. Anderson's History of Commerce, vol. i. for the greatness of their Hanse Towns and other free cities, their wealth, industry, commerce, and territorial possessions. For a long period the merchants of the Hanseatic League, distributed, at the time of their greatest popularity, over seventy-two States, and operating from four great centers of trade, "exercised the sovereign rights of a powerful confederation, formed treaties of commerce, fitted out an armed navy," and for hundreds of years merchants virtually guided the affairs of Western Europe. To such a state of splendor had these merchants risen, that on one occasion a merchant of Antwerp having loaned Charles V. a million of florins, he subsequently, at a feast given to the emperor, burnt the bond in his presence, in a fire made of the then costly cinnamon. And it is also related, that when the wife of Philip the Fair passed a few days in Bruges, she was mortified at finding herself equaled in magnificence of dress by the merchants' wives. "I thought," said she, "that I only had been queen here-but I find that there are above six hundred queens in the city." * In Great Britain, the merchant has ever been a man of power. More than nine hundred years ago, the Anglo-Saxon King Athelstan conferred the rank of thane-equivalent to that of baron now-on every merchant who made three voyages over the sea, i. e., the North Sea, with a vessel and cargo of his own; and though we find it stated that, in the reigns of James I. and Charles I., the aristocracy looked down with disdain upon a London merchant, yet their residences soon began to rival in sumptuousness the palaces of the nobility, many of whom in later years were raised to the peerage from the counting-house; and the dukes of Somerset, Newcastle, and Chandos, the earls of Bath, Essex, Denbigh, Coventry, the Viscount Campden, and the barons Wooten, Carysfoot, and Ashburton, are among the noble families which sprung from English merchants;† while Queen Elizabeth herself was a descendant, in the third generation, of a London mercer, Sir Geoffery Bullen. It has been truly said, "that to the instrumentality of commerce alone the Britannic empire is most peculiarly indebted for its opulence and grandeur; its improvement in art and knowledge, and in general for the great bulk of its solid comfort and conveniences." Strikingly is this remark, made more than a hundred years ago, confirmed by the history of a merchant company, which was chartered by Queen Elizabeth on the last day of the year 1600, "as a body politic and corporate, by the name of the Governor and Company of Merchants of London, trading into the East Indies."§ This corporation, after various changes and vicissitudes, is now the Honorable East India Company, with Asiatic possessions and dependencies twelve times the area of England and Wales; with an army and navy fivefold greater than our own; with a vice-royal state scarcely less brilliant and costly than the Court of St. James; and with nearly quadruple the number of subjects found in Great Britain and Ireland together. This mighty monopoly, for good or for evil, is the result of merchant minds ⚫ Goodman's Social History of Great Britain, &c., i., 222. Herbert's History of the Twelve Great Livery Companies of London, i., 249, 331. Mill's History of British India, i., 230. Lond., 1830. and merchant industry, and has made applicable to England the words which revelation addressed to an ancient city, "Thy merchants were the great men of the earth." With us, also, merchants occupy positions of honor and power-positions which they have secured not only by their world-encompassing trade, but by their intelligence, integrity, industry, and benevolence. We confer upon them, it is true, no titular dignities, though of the only two native Americans in colonial times who received the order of knighthood, one* was a New England merchant, Sir William Pepperell, who left his counting-room for the camp, and, as lieutenant-general, successfully conducted the expedition against Louisburg, in 1745. The patents of the nobility of our merchants are the heart-engraven records of a grateful people; honors far more valuable than can be found in the rolls of the herald's office, or than can spring from the accolade of a royal sword. Merchants were among the foremost of those who planted the thirteen American colonies. Merchants were among the first to resist the principle of taxation without representation-that pivot principle on which turned the revolution. Merchants were among the boldest advocates of American liberty. A Boston merchant's name stands first on the Declaration of Independence, and ten other merchants are among the signers of that Magna Charta of American freedom. A Charleston merchant, Henry Laurens, succeeded John Hancock as President of the Continental Congress. He was also the first Minister Plenipotentiary from the United States to Holland; and in company with Benjamin Franklin and John Jay, negotiated the treaty of peace with Great Britain. A Philadelphia merchant, Robert Morris, trained up in the countinghouse of Charles Willing, guided the finances of the revolution. A Philadelphia merchant, John Maxwell Nesbitt, purchased in his own name, and paid, with his own gold, for provisions which saved the army of Washington, at a time when distress prevailed in its ranks, and when the abandonment of the field seemed absolutely necessary; and it is a fact of history-one of a hundred other facts which should emblazon the names of Philadelphia merchants-that when famine threatened the army, when Cornwallis menaced Philadelphia, and when the appeals of Washington and the recommendation of Congress failed to rouse the patriotism of the country and secure the needed succors, a few gentlemen, principally merchants of Philadelphia, met together, at the suggestion of Robert Morris, and drew up the following paper, which, it has been well said, deserves to rank as a supplement to the Declaration of Independence:— Whereas, in the present situation of public affairs in the United States, the greatest and most vigorous exertions are required for the successful management of the just and necessary war in which they are engaged with Great Britain, we, the subscribers, deeply impressed with the sentiments that on such an occasion should govern us, in the prosecution of a war, on the event of which our own freedom and that of our posterity, and the freedom and independence of the United States are all involved, hereby severally pledge our property and credit, for the several sums specified and mentioned after our names, in order to support the credit of a bank, to be established for furnishing a supply of provisions for • The other was Sir William Phipps. Hazard's Register of Penn., vol. vi., p. 28. |