plebeian, who has a head worth having, breaks through incumbent rank, and comes up to his level. God gives men their measure. Commerce gives them the place to which that measure belongs.

It may seem that every city of commercial wealth convicts these reasonings of error. One may point to the poverty of thousands, at one extreme, and to a sluggish wealth, the obese abundance, of the other extreme. At one end, work and worth; at the other, men of appetite, that are rich, convivial, and unprincipled.

Who were these men? Twenty years ago, this one butchered, that one made candles; another sold cheese, and butter; a fourth, carried on a distillery; another was a contractor on canals; others were merchants, and mechanics. They are acquainted with both ends of society-as their children will be after them, though it will not do to say so out loud. For often you shall find that these toiling worms hatch butterflies, and they live but a year.

Death brings division of property: and it brings new financiers; the old agent is discharged; the young gentlemen takes his revenues, and begins to traveltowards poverty, which he reaches before death,-or his children do, if he do not. So that, in fact, though there is a sort of monied rank, it is not hereditary; it is accessible to all; three good seasons of cotton will send a generation of men up; a score of years will bring them all down, and send their children again to labor. The father grubs, and grows rich; his children strut, and use the money; their children inherit the pride, and go to shiftless poverty; their children, reinvigorated by fresh plebian blood, and by the smell of the clod, come up again. Thus society, like a tree, draws its sap from the earth, changes it into leaves, and blossoms, spreads them abroad in great glory, sheds them off to fall back to the earth, again to mingle with the soil, and at length to reappear in new trees, and fresh garniture.

4. Doubtless you have, in day-dreams, imagined some sequestered valley, in which nature brought together all her treasured iufluences, from every latitude; the products of every zone, the treasures of every realm, the happy discoveries of every land and age.

This, which nature does, in day-dreams, commerce does wide awake, and in good earnest. Every nation casts into a common stock its products. The world divides them. This is better than if the globe possessed a common latitude, and the same products everywhere. For by commerce, we have not only all that the earth produces, but also the benefits of the education, and development, which is inevitably given in searching them, preparing them, and bringing them together.

The ship, that to day leaves your harbor for China, epitomises two thousand years. The manufactures, which freight her, represent the skill of hundreds of years of trial. The ship, itself, stands for the thought and ingenuity of thirty centuries; the skill that navigates her, playing with the winds, eluding, or brav ing storms, searching out the quickest paths on the round-water, and knowing where to find the world-breath, that helps, and shun those that hinder; reading the heavens like a book; standing at midnight by the illuminated binnacle, watching the silent needle, and plunging through the waves without eyes, as directly as if the gates of every harbor shone clear across the ocean,-this skill is the growth of ages.

This process of collection and distribution has a powerful tendency to develop new wants. And the civilization of a nation, is in the ratio of its wants; that is in the number of faculties requiring gratification, and the range or comprehensiveness of each faculty. To supply that want gives new facility to thought, new material to industry. Development and improvement have always followed the footsteps of commerce.

5. Commerce is to be favorably regarded, also a distributor of ideas, laws, customs and religion. The natural appetite for information would never lead men to draw to themselves fore gn ideas. Nations that are shut up to themselves, pursue their own indnstry, foster their own institutions, and revolve in the circle of their own ideas or philosophies, they become narrow and provincial. They

may be strong, they will not be comprehensive, nor rich of thought. Books can travel; scholars, therefore, of the most secluded realms may have a community of ideas. But laws, governments, social or industrial customs do not travel in books.

Hitherto the scholar or the statesman completed their education by travel; they went abroad to finish that which would not come to them.

But commerce sends the world to every man's door; it introduces English notions upon the shores of India, French fashions reign supreme in our Occidental Paris; the ice of Boston cools the sherbet of the nabob; and the nabob's servants insensibly catch at Yankee notions. But though the lazy Asiatic or Oceanic islander catches principally the vices (and civilized vice upon a savage stock is the acme of wickedness,) yet among intelligent nations, the receptivity extends to better things,

The language, the literature, the religious ideas, and especially the civil notions of a free people, travel with their commerce and innoculate the globe. The English tongue, the language of moral ideas, of epic poetry, of laws and government with its stores of religious literature and true liberty, walks the globe. The French language and French ideas pervade Europe. The German language carries German ideas among the learned of every language of the earth.

But neither literature, nor diplomacy, nor religion brought this to pass, but commerce. Principally for the sake of commerce has internationl law sprung up. Commerce has cleared the world of dangers, made the savage submissive, set up forts on every shore, and sentinels thick as stars.

To convey its wares, navigation has come to its present perfection. Marine architecture has made the ocean well nigh as safe as the land, and steam has brought together the ends of the earth. This knitting men together has resulted in unexpected influences. Once it mattered little whether nations fought or dwelt in the arts of peace. But so near are we now brought, that a war anywhere disturbs somewhat the equilibrium of the world. It is becoming every year more important to commerce that peace should be universal. So soon as commerce demands peace we shall have it. Commerce, too, demands civilization; for the savage state is one of few wants. As men emerge from barbarism their necessities grow. The looms of Kidderminster, the forges of Sheffield, and the shops of Birmingham demand civilization.

Thus, by its facility of egress and approch, by its ubiquity, commerce arterializes the globe. It forms and sustains a circulation among nations, by which we may cast into the stream whatever interest or truth we have, and straitway it loses its sectional character and becomes universal. Our Bible, our religious teachers, go with our fabrics and products to every corner of the earth.

6. That commerce tends to refinement need hardly be said after what we have already said. Different climates seem propitious to different interests. The heathenism of Athens would never have been developed in the gloomy forests of Gaul; nor could the Druid rites of Britain, or the Scandinavian mythology have been born upon the Tiber or the Nile.

The arts love delicious climes; labor loves temperate zones, and there dwell the mechanic arts. The orange-trees of Jamaica or Cuba bear the golden globes, not for the islanders alone, but for America and Europe. So, too, the genius of any one nation is fruitful, not for itself, but for the civilized globe. The refinements of one nation pass to another. The shops of Paris adorn our mansions with bronzes, and our persons with exquisite jewelry. The music of Italy comes here; the instrumentation of Germany has the world for its field. The scholar knows that his work will go to all scholars. The poet who breathes divine numbers is inspired for mankind. The painters of every clime travel in their pictures to every clime. The artists of each land vie with those of every other, in all the capitals of all kingdoms or republics.

It matters not where any good is born or created, commerce imparts universality to it. And thus the refinement of one people diffuses itself to all.

II. THE EVILS OF COMMERCE.

We are not to confound the dangerous evils of wealth with the evils of commerce. It is losely said to promote luxury and license. This it may do, but it is only done by the augmentation of wealth, and is a danger not special to commerce, but to accumulators of wealth in all ways.

1st. The first evil at which we glance is the facility afforded by commerce for the diffusion of evil. It affords the same currency to lies as to truth, to mischief as to benevolence. It can diffuse freedom or the conservatism of authority, It may spread the Bible, and just so much the licentious novelist, or the infidel sophist.

In our own land, the incursion of foreign ideas, through the channels of commerce, is not imperceptible. The literature of the continent, the portfolios of lust, the laxity of morals, the extravagant gaities and luxuriousness of living, are too apparent in some quarters to require exposition.

Commerce does not discriminate. It is a mail, and knows not what it carries. It is a stream, and sends down whatever falls into it, whether poisonous weeds or useful timber.

Those influences which are the most active and persevering, will take possession of the human mind. If evil have more vitality than goodness, it will posess the earth. If goodness mean to rule, it must be a better traveler, a better teacher, a more enduring laborer than is evil.

2. While commerce upon the great scale tends to infuse a certain largeness and magnanimity upon its chiefs, it yet more manifestly tends to meanness in its

details.

It is well that men have a half-dozen separate characters. If the petty meanness and vulgarities of trade were diffused through the whole man, traders would be legalized banditti. But a man may have a social character, a political character, a religious character, and a professional character, and he may conduct himself very differently in each. In one, conscience may be set up as the rule; in another, custom; in another, public sentiment-so that a man may be honorable in private, and yet dishonest in public affairs; a man may be a good neighbor and kind householder, yet a very trickster in traffic.

In commerce, the temptations are in general to dishonesty and to untruth; but, unfortunately, not to bold dishonesties and lion-like lies, but to the meanest forms of both.

The

It is this vulgarity of petty sin-it is this low and shuffling iniquity-this lurking sniffling, creeping quality, that the trading of commerce is most afflicted with. I regard great sins in some respects to be less than small ones. smaller a wickedness is, and meaner, the greater is its guilt and essential depravity. Lions are enough dangerous; but who would not rather die by the stroke of a lion's paw, and be eaten in reasonable haste, than to die by vermin?

Now, lions there are in commerce, and bears full enough; but it is its shocking facility at breeding vermin, that makes one shrink from the thought of giving his

son to commerce.

Let the facts be considered:

In the preparation for markets, home and foreign, wholesale and retail, what a list of impositions, adulterations and frauds, under every letter of the alphabet, might be made out. It is hardly too much to say, that goods are incarnated lies. We that consume, are daily in the consumption of lies- we drink lying coffee, we eat lying food, we patch lying cloth with cheating thread, we perfume ourselves with lying essence, we wet our feet in lying boots, catch cold, however, truly enough-are tormented with adulterated drugs,* sometimes from ignorant pre scribers, who lie in pretending to know what they are prescribing, or what they

* Dr. Bailey, during the nine months he held the office of Examiner under the Government, at the port of New York, rejected over forty-five tons of spurious or vitiated drugs.-See Mercants' Magazine for Jan., 1851, vol. xxiv., page 130,

are prescribing for. It is the very business of one part of commerce to deal in appearances and not in realities, and the mind is trained to deception.

But the traffic in such wares, and in all sound and genuine things, opens a sphere of temptation beyond that known to mortal man anywhere else.

For the trafficker deals in a thousand different things, and each separate thing has its own separate temptation; and he deals in each thing a hundred times a day, and with hundreds of different dispositions. And if a dealer sell a fraudulent tea, knowing it to be so, to fifty different persons, it is not one single act, but fifty different frauds. If he sell to fifty different merchants fifty bales of goods, knowing them to be cheating, there are as many separate frauds as there were bargains, and as there were special items in each bargain.

Thus the lies of commerce are, each one, perhaps, fine and filmy as a spider's thread, but spun together, they become like spiders' webs. But this indirection, this falsehood by the most indirect way, is worse than bold and outright falsehood; because it is usually cowardly, hypocritical, and more frequent. The dishonesty is under the form of frankness; or it nestles under an air of sanctity; or it is jovial, or bland and insinuating. It is a wink or a word, or a nod of the head, or a significant smile. It is said that every man has his price. Most men have. Some men have not. But there are thousands of men who sell themselves; they barter their conscience over any bargain; their honor goes down with every kick of the scales. If they were black, and put up for sale at the capital, upon a fair day in prosperous times, they might bring $1,000 or $1,200. But they sell themselves much more reasonably, inasmuch as they have the privilege of repeating the sale so often.

If one adulterate and sell for real, then the profit per pound, of the deception on a fair article, is the price of his conscience. Some men will sell their conscience for five cents a pound in butter; ten cents in provisions; for twenty per cent in drugs; for a hundred per cent in jewelry.

If a community be filled with trades, and if there is prevalent a petty code of dishonesties, and traders of every degree become innured to it, no one ean fail to see that manliness, simplicity, large mindedness, trustworthiness, will disappear, and men become hollow or vulgar! To such an extent has this taken place, that Dr. Chalmers expressed his belief that commerce, in its lower form, was incompatible with manliness and honor!

3. Growing out of this, we shall find in commerce, if we remember rightly, a tendency to substitute selfishness for conscience.

Commerce is a constant race, a constant struggle, an unending battle. The prize of wealth quite blinds men; but its attractions are hardly greater than are the ambitions, envy and jealousies of rival contestants.

The wrestling of men with each other, the trippings and shovings, the covert dexterities or open dishonesties, are sufficiently reprehensible. But it is the law which comes to prevail; that interest is sovereign which we most depricate. There are very honorable men in commerce, but they do not rule. The public sentiment is not produced by the best men. Interest is allowed to be the touchstone,

and selfishness is the judge and arbiter of affairs.

Wherever a dazzling show of gain opens, thither rush the crowding rout like a herd of buffaloes; and he who stands to turn them back because the end is wrong or the reasons wrong, fares as he would that should attempt to head the droves on the prairies.

They would rush him down, gore him, trample him, and thunder past in a cloud of dust.

The law of God and the law of human prosperity are fortunately coincident. In the main, therefore, the selfishness of commerce conduces to the prevalence of general good. But when some apparent good or some good for a part, at the expense of the whole, demands the violation of moral law, nothing will transgress with more implacable purpose than the spirit of commerce.

Commercial communities are liable to have money made a measure of value. This is right in merchandise; but commerce tends to produce a state of public

sentiment, in which men work by their money values; in which commercial virtue takes precedence of moral excellence; in which wealth becomes rank, honor and authority. When men are measured by the scale of their financier, gold has corrupted integrity; virtue becomes cankered, and ruin impends.

Although commerce has many kindly influences for art, and achieves for men a leisure befiting art, and wealth for its support, yet, there is danger that art will be regarded as but a higher form of merchandise-artists will become artisans. They will be paid upon a scale of prices which will make the painters of a house or ship and the painter of a historic scene, but different levels of one trade. The moment that art ceases to be labor from love, and toil in the spirit of gain, it is debauched.

The same evil creeps stealthily upon the church. The power of religion is moral power. It is the natural force of goodness. It is the power of heroic humanity. It is the power of men walking fearlessly in the Spirit of God.

When for this the Church relies for her force upon architecture, upon wealth, upon the secular influence of thrifty numbers, upon an adroit connivance with the popular will, upon mere refinements and trappings, she has been secular

ized.

The danger is especially to be dreaded in a commercial mart. Commerce knows nothing of unprofitable fervors, of non-paying graces, of a religion which melts the pocket to enrich the heart. Nowhere ought there to be such a jealousy of secular influence, such a double and tripple match against insiduous, worldly prudence, as among churches in a commercial atmosphere.

It is a matter of great joy and of devout thanksgiving, that in this land commerce is engrafted upon a tough integrity, upon a strong religious stock. We regard the conflicts of the present hour to be the conflicts of selfishness, in the armies of commerce with the spirit of Christianity. It is justice, rectitude, humanity, on one side, expediency, interest, and injustice on the other.

The battler may have many phases, but only one issue. It is but for good men to stand firm. Let men be tried. Let those that are not genuine be cast from the bough like an untimely fruit. When all that are fearful have fled, and the expedient have equivocated and dodged; when the pusillanimous have surrendered, and the insincere have circulated in all the words of hypocrisy, there will be found enough left of unshaken honor, and unbribed humanity, to redeem the name of commerce from disgrace.

I fervently believe that Christianity is a lever in Commerce! That out of the mart shall spring forth developments of Christian character, Christian enterprise, honor, vast achievement that shall show the world how noble, and how omnipotent for good may commerce become when exorcised of selfishness. She sits, elothed and in her right mind, at the feet of Jesus!

Art. II.-INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.

A SKETCH OF THE RISE, PROGRESS, AND PRESENT CONDITION OF INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.

NUMBER VI.

RATES OF TOLL ON THE NEW YORK STATE CANALS.

THE success of the New York Canals is closely identified with a just discrimination and a liberal policy, in regard to the rates of tolls exacted by the State. In alluding to the subject of constructing the Erie Canal by incorporating companies for the purpose, or "achieving this great work" by the State, the memorial to the Legislature from the city of New York in 1816,