of one year with Great Britain is of more service to her than would have been a twenty years' monopoly of the trade of what the thirteen colonies would now be, had they remained subject to the British crown.

From the very outset we have been a commercial people, and, Heaven favoring us, we must with our two ocean fronts, and our vast country and energetic population, furnish the most wondrous spectacle of commercial growth and strength the world ever witnessed, provided we cultivate and maintain amity with the outer world and break not ourselves asunder. I do not think that we are, as the feet of the great image Daniel saw, compounded of iron and clay. Understand me not as undervaluing agriculture, manufactures, or the arts. Without them there can be, in this age, no Commerce. They all act in unison to create prosperity. They must co-exist or languish. Commerce is the creature and stimulant of industry in all its forms. Never again will the world see the time when a nation can make itself the sole mart of particular commodities, and grow rich from a monopoly of silks and spices. In substance trade is now free to general competition, though, in detail, it is everywhere, whether wisely or unwisely, hampered by imposts, and subject to exaction. It is strongest and most beneficent where freest. It is not a ferocious animal which must be muzzled and chained down to labor, but a strong implanted impulse which will break forth, and needs but the regulation of justice and humanity to exert the happiest influence on the whole family of man.

Of our present greatness and future hopes we owe much to the energizing spirit of Commerce. It has prompted to negotiations, and sustained our government in struggles, which have expanded our country to its present amplitude. It acquired the debouchure of the Mississippi; it carried the flag of our Union across the Rocky Mountains, and planted it at the mouth of the Columbia, and upon the golden hills of California. It must preserve what it has acquired, for we have, and can have, no other assured hope of continued union. Heaven has, so far, bidden discovery and enterprise to keep pace with and consolidate our growth. The canal, the railroad, the application of steam to ocean navigation, and the magnetic telegraph, have sufficed to preserve intact the holy bond of union. Would that I could see perfected some plan of swift communication and intercourse over the vast steppes and mountains that intervene between the eastern and western sides of this broad continent!

Perhaps I can bring home to you a sense of the marvelous beneficence of Commerce by a familiar illustration. I remember indistinctly a petty village which, thirty years ago, had been wakened into dull life some ten years before by the hope of the construction to it of a channel of trade. It stood at the extremity of a large lake, and its puny trade consisted chiefly in shipping salt, and conveying a scant rill of emigration Westward, to a vast region which was mainly wild, inhospitable, and dangerous, and had no hope of greatness. That channel of Commerce was finished at last, and connected the lake with tide-waters, and the feeble stream swelled to a torrent of human beings, rolling into the wilderness, and making the desert places glad with the hum of active industry. That wilderness is now severed into powerful States, glorying in freedom, adorned with thriving villages and great marts, and gathering strength and beauty in this their adolescence. That petty village is now our city -a city with which I do so identify myself and love so much, that to speak with my estimation of it might seem like boasting. Alas, that the

avenue of intercourse which has worked this great good, and done so much to commingle otherwise discordant portions of our country, should have been so misused by selfish politicians, who look to the meanest influences to aid their elevation!

It created the wealth, the Commerce which gave birth to the railroads, which are extended over the land like an iron net. Like all great improvements, it called for further improvements. It cannot be strangled by its children. It is in no danger from their envy or their competition. I cannot approve the policy which would pronounce them rivals, and invoke State pride and policy to impose checks upon the free current of Commerce in aid of our canal. It has paid for itself in wealth, if that is the test of utility to our own State, a thousand times its cost. I honor the canal as a monument of the far-seeing wisdom and the calm intrepidity of a great mind, to which I claim near kin; but I would maintain it only for its uses.

The prosperity of Buffalo is based upon Commerce, and not upon any particular means of commercial intercourse. It is founded upon a rock. Were I satisfied that, in utility to Commerce, the canal had been superseded by railroads, I would not hesitate an instant to say, " Fill it up, and foster these new and better conduits of trade!" I would not use the windmill because--if such be the fact-it preceded the watermill; nor denounce the steamboat because it is a later invention. We must move forward and upward, and nothing effete can be so sacred as to be permitted to stay us in our course.

I have neither time nor disposition to dilate upon the ordinary duties and qualifications of the thriving merchant. With him, indeed, honesty is the best policy; and he must remember that it is "the liberal hand which maketh rich." He may be economical to the verge of closeness, but he must "lend unto the Lord," or he will not prosper. Liberal dealing with the needy is but justice. He may give strict weight to the rich, and serve him with the strict measure, but he should give liberal weight and heaped measure to the poor. He should be above the petty cheats, and scorn the customary frauds of trade. He should sell things by their right names, without deceitful intermixture or adulteration; he should remember his manhood, and keep his lips from lies, and render his own unto every man with courtesy.

The great merchant occupies a high, a truly exalted station. He stands alone in the same sense as does the commander of an army. He cannot personally supervise all the details of his enormous business, but he regulates them all, appoints to each counselor his place, prescribes his duty, and limits his responsibility, and directs the vast machine. He understands the nature and connection of every part of the complicated system of which he is the animating principle; and upon the first appearance of disorder, can and will trace it to its source, however deeply hidden. His eye takes in the general working and results, and, in time of need, sweeps like a falcon's through every cranny and recess of the business engine he has constructed, till it rests upon the defective portion. His spirit pervades, sustains, and gives activity to the else formal and inactive mass, and makes it fruitful.

In the conduct of his business, he must combine the wisdom of the serpent with the harmlessness of the dove. He navigates his richly-fraught vessel through a most treacherous sea, however smiling, and must move

with caution. He must be conversant with the general principles of commercial law, and familiar with all the forms and requisites of commercial contracts; and yet prefer to act, where the occasion calls for it, upon professional advice. He is careful to see that his bargains are binding in the law; that what the law requires to be in writing is written; and that the true intention of his contract is clearly, fully, and validly expressed. But this knowledge and conformity to law is a shield to him in his ordinary dealings, and not a sword. He is a soul of honor, and his word is indeed his bond among his fellows. Small praise, indeed, for honor is a necessity of his noble occupation. The great mass of commercial bargains are purely honorary contracts, and the merchant who breaks his word in the exchange, loses caste at once, and irretrievably becomes the scorn of the high-minded, and is justly driven forth with shame.

In his business he obeys the laws of the country which protects him. He incurs not the hazard of illicit trade, and pockets no profits filched from the revenue of the nation by false oaths or papers. He seeks gains which conscience can approve.

I would fain believe that the slave-trade has been always conducted in a Christian age by a distinct class of men who were abhorred by all fair traders. I would fain attribute not to mercantile greed, but to the errors of the British government alone, that damning stain upon the fair fame of our mother country, the Opium War. In his ordinary business he is content with the legitimate profits of the market, and will not resort to artificial means to inflate or depress it to the injury of the public. He is not a speculator, nor has he any faith in fortune, however firmly he may believe in an overruling Providence. Sheer folly has, indeed, made some men rich. It would seem that heaven sometimes delights to shower wealth on the simple to confound the wise, and turns to gold all things they touch. Of such was the man who blundered into wealth by sending warming-pans to the West Indies. It turned out that the pans and covers, when separated, were most useful to the sugar boilers as dippers and strainers, and so he reaped a mighty profit where he deserved but shame.

and loss.

But the true merchant hazards nothing upon a bare hope, a naked trust in fortune. His ventures are the result of calculations into which he brings every element at his command from which the future can be foreseen. He bargains, provides, and purchases and sells, with reference to a change; but he prognosticates that change from present facts and old experience. He is, in fact, in part at least, a statesman; for the trade of a country is the chief care of its rulers, and the merchant must, in his foreign dealings, watch the statesmen of his day, and be conversant with the policy and political condition of foreign countries, as well as with the present state of their markets, or he may not reach them at their height. So near akin is statesmanship to mercantile accomplishments, that no man is worthy to hold the reins of government who seeks not counsel from the enlightened votaries of Commerce.

The merchant should be rapid in decision and instantaneous in action; the precursor rather than the companion or follower of others. When the discovery of gold in California caused such an influx of unprovided population into that land of promise, the race for mercantile profit was to the foremost only, as we now see clearly. The sagacious few foresaw vast earnings, though they should lose their ships from the desertion of the

seamen, if they could but be first in that new market-and they were the first. The tardy sent rich cargoes to a glutted market, and suffered loss from nearly all their ventures; while the abandoned ships lay rotting idle within the golden gate.

But, alas, the merchant has not the gift of perfect prescience! He may suffer from villainy; or the habitual caution of a lifetime may fail him in a fatal moment, and bring him down to ruin. This fortune is too often "in ventures squandered abroad. But ships are but boards, sailors but men. There be land rats and water rats; water thieves and land thieves; and then there is the perils of water, winds, and rocks." The perils which environ the wealth embarked in Commerce are innumerable; but of the land perils, I know none more imminent or mortal than that which flows from a system of baseless credit.

But be that as it may, merchants must occasionally fail, and it is a pitiable sight, that of the honest, long-established merchant fallen from his palmy state, and deserted, like the hunted deer, by his companions. Where such a man is prostrated by mere misfortune, and his associates step not forward to bind up his wounds and to sustain him, it argues ill for them-it indicates that they possess not that delight in honorable competition which unites rather than dissevers generous minds, and that esprit du corps so beneficial to the public in large commercial cities.

In this connection I must be permitted to anticipate a sound rule of commercial ethics which will, I doubt not, be most fully stated and cogently enforced by the gentlemen who will hereafter lecture before you on that subject. A high-minded merchant may be sustained by credit, but he can have no concealment of the state of his affairs from those whose capital he uses. If misfortune sweeps away or seriously impairs his means of payment, he will not use or stretch a trust which he knows is falsely founded, and endeavor by some great, rash stroke, which hazards all, to retrieve his losses. He is not misled by the too common expression, “involving himself in further difficulties." He knows that by using his groundless credit, he would involve the property, perchance the happiness of others, in his selfish schemes; and he yields to the promptings of justice, and stops at one, or preliminarily submits the question whether he shall stop, to those whose wealth makes up his seeming capital.

The true exemplar of a merchant is a noble spectacle. He has borne up bravely amid vicissitudes which no sagacity could foresee or avert, and has often presented the spectacle the gods, it is said, delight in-that of a good man contending vainly with fate. But though often defeated, he has at last conquered, and has placed his banner upon a commanding eminence. He is devoid of ostentation, and looks to substance rather than to show, and moves in the world with a dignified simplicity which renders him indeed a man of mark, where the idle pageantry of wealth would be ridiculous. Perhaps he finds enjoyment in rural, scientific, or literary pursuits, for which business before allowed him but scant leisure; and his honorable career insures him the appropriate solaces of old age, such as "honor, love, obedience, troops of friends." He proves, too, that the economy which pervaded every department of his business, and forbade the waste of even a scrap of paper, was wisely conscientious, by adorning his native or adopted city with the useful monuments of his philanthropy. Look our country over, and you will find not only that the merchant bas a heart "open as day to melting charity," but a hand that has been most

active in promoting every scheme of public enterprise. Churches, hospitals, public libraries, seminaries of learning, have heen founded by the hoards of the successful merchant.

A prudent liberality is so common in all classes of my countrymen, that it may well be regarded as a characteristic of the nation. But when I think of the massive and enduring monuments, fraught in the perennial good to man and to their country, our great merchants have erected, I am compelled to say that, were I capable of envy, I would envy rather such men as Touro, Girard, or Astor, than some, at least, of the so-called orators and statesmen who have achieved for their names high places in history.

And now that I have closed the brief course of remark which at the outset I have proposed unto myself, I feel that I cannot so part with you, and yet cannot express how ardently I yearn for your success, and for the extension and permanent foundation of this institution. Under Providence, your future is in your own keeping, and must be colored and decided by yourselves. In this college we behold a manly and most praiseworthy effort to assert practically a principle which seems a truism, but is in general disregarded. I will not think it possible that it can be permitted to languish; and in its success, I see a long line of princely merchants insured to Buffalo, and a safe omen that the city will be distinguished among its sisters for industry and morality, for wealth and its embellishments, and as a seat of learning and a favorite haunt of science and the

arts.

Art. IV.-COMMERCE OF THE UNITED STATES.

NUMBER XIX.

FRENCH AND SPANISH WAR-SUCCESSES OF ENGLAND-VAST EXTENSION OF COLONIAL EMPIRETRADE DURING AND AFTER THE WAR-ENFORCEMENT OF THE OLD SUGAR ACT-WRITS OF ASSISTANCE"-NEW TARIFF ACTS-RUIN OF THE FOREIGN WEST INDIA TRADE-EFFECTS ON THE COLONIES, ON THE WEST INDIES, AND ON ENGLAND-PROPOSITION OF A STAMP DUTY.

1761-1764. THE French being expelled from Canada in 1761, the continental provinces of England returned to a state of peace, the war, however, raging in Europe, on the ocean, and among the West Indies, until 1763. France was quite ready to come to an arrangement upon the loss of Canada and the West, and actually proposed an accommodation on the basis of the uti possedetis, to which England was perfectly willing to assent; but Spain having become now jealous of England's power in America, and being ready to join France in an effort to restore the fortune of the latter, the French withdrew from the negotiation, and entered upon the contest with renewed vigor. In the winter of 1761-2, Spain broke off her friendly relations with England, who declared war against her in consequence in January, 1762. The allies endeavored to force Portugal to come into the combination against England, but that now reduced kingdom preferred to continue her ancient friendship with Britain, and wast effectively sustained by the latter in her position against the arms of her two neighbors.

The English were almost invariably successful during the remainder of