oo busy to be given to gossip, too
unrestrained in their intercourse with numbers to retain much prudery:
social despotism and subservience have become impossible: there is a
generous spirit of enterprise, an enlargement of knowledge, an
amelioration of opinion. There is, on the other hand, perhaps a decrease
of kindly neighbourly regard, and certainly a great increase of the low
vices which are the plague of commercial cities. Such is the
transformation wrought by commerce. An observer who can also
speculate,--one who looks before and after,--will conclude that, amidst
some evil, the change is advantageous; and that good must, on the whole,
arise from enlarged intercourses between men and societies. Seeing in
commerce the instrument by which all the inhabitants of the earth are in
time to be brought into common possession of all true ideas, and
sympathy in all good feelings, he will mark the progress made by the
society he visits towards this end. He will mark whether its merchants
as a body have a spirit of generous enterprise or of sordid
self-interest; whether they entertain a respect for learning and a taste
for art,--bringing the one from abroad, and cherishing the other at
home;--whether, in short, the merchants are the princes or the
money-grubbers of the community. The spirit of this class will determine
that of their subordinates. If the masters of commerce are liberal and
enlightened, their servants will be thriving, and will have the virtues
which wait upon self-respect: if the contrary, they will be debased. A
Jewish money-lender is no more like a merchant of Salem or Bourdeaux
than Malay porters at Macao are like the clerk class of Amsterdam. In
the mercantile orders of society may be found the extremes of honour,
generosity, diligence, and accuracy,--and of treachery, meanness, and
selfish carelessness. It is the traveller's business to note the
tendencies to the one or the other,--from the vexatious hog and yam
traffic of the islands of the South Sea, to the magnificent transactions
of the traders of Hamburgh.

* * * * *

The Health of a community is an almost unfailing index of its morals. No
one can wonder at this who considers how physical suffering irritates
the temper, depresses energy, deadens hope, induces recklessness, and,
in short, poisons life. The domestic affections, too, are apt to
languish through disappointment in countries where the average of death
is ve