it had been won by him, felt also that God had impressed wealth with a trust, and that the trustee must pass his accounts. He gave much, and by preference he gave in secret. He gave also with delicacy of manner, and the nice feelings of a gentleman. His was no narrow or one-sided beneficence. He knew no distinction of politics or creed when a man needed help. He was a moral and religious man. He was grave in exterior, yet humorous, with a quiet relish of fun. He had small respect for a man of idle life -for anyone, in short, who was not useful; and neither fashion nor rank, without good service of some sort, won any allegiance from him. He was the true child of commerce. The productive industry of England, its value and its power-these were his abiding themes."

Public duty sought such a man as Peel, and, feeling that he could assist his country in forwarding the claims of Commerce, he entered Parliament at the age of forty and held his seat for thirty years.

It is unnecessary to detail here Sir Robert Peel's parliamentary career. He was sturdy and true to his principles. He was a merchant before all else—not a petty trader, but a great, broad-minded merchant. He felt that the country should be managed as a great business, on practical lines. He was not a politician, but he was made of the stuff which accomplishes much. His was no bickering, technical mind. His ideas were broad, his foot was planted securely on the ground, he thought well and deeply, he spoke well, and he voted as he believed, with fear or favour toward no man.

His son, born in 1788, who is much better known as a statesman than his merchant father, was from an early age intended and educated for a public career, and was elected a member of Parliament in 1809, when he was but twenty-one years old. He and his father occasionally found themselves on opposite sides in some public question, but each presented his views to the assembled Parliament with that same sterling determination to work and vote for what he believed to be best.

The great merchant-statesman did not retire from public service until he reached his seventieth year, and

from that time he lived quietly at his magnificent home Drayton Park. As his years increased he resigned more and more of the details of his great business to his sons. He could not be idle, for work had become an inveterate habit. He collected pictures, and spent much time in works of philanthropy, doing without ostentatiousness many acts of great kindness which meant much to those he helped. When he learned that a large cotton house which had long been an active competitor of his own had by disastrous speculations come to the edge of bankruptcy, Sir Robert secretly advanced, without security, a large sum of money which enabled the house to tide over its difficulties. Again a house failed, and its heads, the two sons of a merchant with whom he had had business dealings, lost not only their own fortunes but also the portions of their three sisters. To each of the sisters he sent a large cheque which relieved them of the insistence of the wolf at the door, and he used his influence to re-establish the sons.

Of many such acts of great kindness we may mention one more. A clergyman whom Sir Robert liked well obtained from the Lord Chancellor the promise of a vacant living, but before the promise could be carried out changes took place in the ministry and another man was appointed rector. Thereupon Sir Robert at once purchased the advowson of another equally good living and presented it to the worthy clergyman.

Sir Robert died in his eightieth year surrounded by a happy family of children and grandchildren, and thus closed a beautiful life full of achievement and great success. He was of the kind of stuff which placed the Fugger family in its high place, that made de la Pole, Whittington and Gresham famous. He built from imagination, and he wove into his life the fascinating threads of romance. His was a career that might well inspire young men in any part of the world to exercise the will-power that can make them whatever they choose to be.

XXI

TRADE AND THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY 1

HEN Dr. Johnson was asked to write a funeral sermon for the daughter of a tradesman, and was told that she was remarkable for her humility and condescension to inferiors, he observed "that those were very laudable qualities, but it might not be so easy to discover who the lady's inferiors. were." One would hesitate to apply the unpleasant term snob to "the great lexicographer or to his profound admirer, the genteel Miss Jenkins of Cranford; yet they both undoubtedly possessed that innate respect for rank and position, and that equally innate distrust of anything connected with trade which is a mark of one species of snob. How and when this type of snobbery arose in England is worth a little consideration. To the present generation, accustomed to see a Lipton, a Pink, or a Barker figuring in the Honours List side by side. with the advertisements of their groceries, jams, or general goods, the bestowal of a knighthood, baronetcy, or peerage is the natural culmination of a successful business career. Few would ask with Boswell, "What is the reason we are angry at a trader's having opulence? Nor would many agree with Johnson's reply: "Why, sir, the reason is (though I don't undertake to prove that there is a reason) we see no qualities in trade that should entitle a man to superiority. We are not angry at a

1 This chapter has been prepared for the author by one thoroughly informed upon this intricate but interesting subject.

soldier's getting riches, because we see that he possesses qualities that we have not. If a man returns from a battle having lost one hand and with the other full of gold we feel that he deserves the gold; but we cannot think that a fellow by sitting all day at a desk is entitled to get above us. . . . A merchant may perhaps be a man of an enlarged mind, but there is nothing in trade connected with an enlarged mind." At the present time, although our admiration for our soldiers has by no means diminished, and we should be glad-if a trifle surprised to see their labours rewarded with wealth, we have attained to a higher, not to say juster, appreciation of our traders. Nowadays indeed we approach more nearly to the opinions of the Erewhonians, who held that "He who makes a colossal fortune in the hosiery trade, and by his energy has succeeded in reducing the price of woollen goods by the thousandth part of a penny in the pound, this man is worth ten professional philanthropists. So strongly are the Erewhonians impressed with this, that if a man has made a fortune of over £20,000 a year they exempt him from all taxation, considering him as a work of art and too precious to be meddled with; they say, 'How very much he must have done for society, before society could be prevailed upon to give him so much money'; so magnificent an organization overawes them; they regard it as a thing dropped from heaven."

Probably the plant of anti-trade snobbery flourished most vigorously in the generation which looked up to George IV. as "the First Gentleman in Europe," and in the succeeding period of sham and humbug which has rendered the epithet Victorian a term of abuse. At no other period could Evan Harrington have blushed so confusedly to find himself identified as the son of "the great Mel," that prince of tailors and most magnanimous of snips, as worthy to found a race of gentry as ever was Daniel Byrne, the Dublin tailor from whom the Lords de Tabley drew their descent. Yet even two centuries