gets through much more work. I do not think the better of a merchant if I see him always in a hurry; if he tells me he received my letter, but was so hurried that he had not time to answer it, or that he put it somewhere among his papers, and when he wished to answer it he could not find it. A man who acts systematically will arrange his business beforehand, and thus find time to do it all.

4. The Romans were not loquacious men. They were much inferior to the Greeks in vividness of imagination and in affluence of speech. I do not, by any means, intend to recommend taciturnity in general company. Conversation is one of the means by which knowledge is communicated, and the character of mankind is improved. As rough diamonds become smooth by being shaken together in a bag, so the asperities of men are softened down by their intercourse with each other. But it adds nothing to the character of a merchant, to make use of many words in matters of business; this argues either great indecision of character, or great prodigality of time. Time is money; talk as much as you please when you have nothing else to do, but don't talk more than is necessary until your business is done. The late Mr. Wesley, the venerable founder of the body of the Wesleyan Methodists, a body who have done much good in educating the poor, laid it down as one qualification for admission into his society, that the candidate should not use many words in buying and sel. ling. A most excellent rule, and one which, if steadily adhered to, would save much time, and produce other good effects.

Not only should you avoid many words in commercial conversation, you should also avoid too many words in your commercial correspondence. Long letters on matters of business are exceedingly tiresome. Let all your letters be as short as the subject will admit. Come at once to the point, express your meaning clearly in a few plain words, and then close. The man who introduces a variety of unnecessary circumstances, who is fond of using tropes and figures of speech, or has a lengthy, prosy style, is very ill qualified to conduct the correspondence of a commercial estab lishment. You ought also to be careful to write a plain hand; you impose upon your correspondents a very unnecessary and a very unpleasant tax, if you require them to go over your letters two or three times in order to decipher your writing. It is presumed, that when you write a letter, you write for the purpose of communicating your ideas to the person to whom the letter is addressed; why, then, throw difficulties in the way, by writing in an illegible hand. A business hand is equally opposed to a very fine hand. A letter written in fine, elegant writing, adorned with a variety of flourishes, will give your correspondents no very high opinion of you as a man of business. Some persons have contended that a man's character may be discovered by his hand-writing. It may be doubted whether a man's intellectual powers can be ascertained in this way, but perhaps his moral qualities may thus be sometimes exhibited. For instance, if he write an illegible hand, it may be inferred that he is not very anxious about the comfort of the parties to whom he writes.

5. The great defect in the commercial character of the Romans was their military spirit.

In every age of the world military men have looked upon merchants as a class vastly inferior to their own. And this will always be the case, so long as mankind shall pay more respect to the arts of war than to the arts of peace. But it is more surprising, that merchants themselves, instead

of forming more correct notions of their own importance, have fallen in with the popular prejudice, and aped the manners of the military class. Hence, we find that merchants have sometimes settled their disputes with each other by duelling. That military men should do this may excite no surprise. Though, when we consider, that among the heroic Greeks and the martial Romans the practice of duelling was unknown, it can never be contended that this practice is necessary to maintain the personal courage of our military officers. On this ground we might also permit duelling among the common men. But if military men, when they have none of their country's enemies to shoot, wish to keep themselves in practice by shooting one another, they may allege that they are acting according to the principles of their profession. But nothing can be more out of character than for a mercantile man to be engaged in a duel. When a case came before the late Lord Ellenborough, in which one merchant had attempted to provoke another to fight a duel, his lordship observed, that merchants would be much better employed in posting their books than in posting one another.

One effect of the military spirit is, that it leads to cruelty of disposition. The Romans were cruel men, cruel towards their slaves, cruel towards their conquered enemies, cruel in their punishments, cruel in their amusements. No disposition is more opposed than this to the spirit of commerce, and yet, on some occasions, merchants have become the instru ments of cruelty. Is there nothing cruel in selling spirituous liquors to half-civilized nations ?-nothing cruel in supplying the munitions of war to untutored tribes who would otherwise remain at peace ?-and was there nothing cruel in the African slave trade-a traffic that must be numbered among the blackest of our country's crimes, the most crimson of our national sins? Merchants should not only act honestly in their trade, but should also ascertain that the trade itself is an honest trade. For, although it be true, upon the ordinary principles of profits and loss, that honesty is the best policy, yet we should not practise honesty solely from motives of policy, nor infer the honesty of an enterprise from its apparent policy. Beware of taking a mere commercial view of questions of morality. Crimes the most atrocious have sometimes been profitable. But you see not the whole of the balance sheet. There are items in the account which no arithmetic can express. What estimate will you place upon infamy of character, remorse of conscience, the retributive justice of God in the present life, and his vengeance in the next? Take these into your calcu. lation, and then sum up the amount of your gains.

As commerce extends her sway, the military spirit may be expected to subside, and peace and equity prevail. Commerce will teach mankind that it is their interest to live at peace with each other. Commerce will teach the slave owner that the man who keeps in bondage his fellow man, sins no less against his own interest than against the feelings of humanity and the injunctions of religion. Commerce will show to those who "sit in high places," that the vulgar maxim, "honesty is the best policy," is as applicable to the affairs of communities, as to the transactions of individuals, and that what is morally wrong can never be politically right. Commerce will inculcate upon nations, that the prosperity of one people is not an injury, but an advantage to the others; that national greatness can arise only from superiority in industry and in knowledge; and that nations, like individuals, should seek each other's welfare, and endeavor to promote

universal peace. When these sentiments are acknowledged, the Demon of national discord will be driven from the earth-the clangor of arms, and the shrieks of the vanquished, will be heard no more-and the Genius of War, in his dying moments, will surrender the palm of victory into the hands of Commerce.

Art. 11.-MEMOIR OF SAMUEL SLATER,

THE FATHER OF AMERICAN MANUFACTURES.

[WITH A PORTRAIT.]

THERE is no individual deserving a more honored perpetuity in American annals than the one named above. True, he had no far back ancestry, as common in the land of his birth, to nourish a silly pride. Heraldry had no laurels to encircle him. The dazzling splendors of a court had never cast their lustre upon him. Nor is it known that he could cast an eye of complacency on any one of his own blood who had been particularly distinguished in the army, the navy, or the church. No, that blood had descended through successive generations-not by inundating floods and over lofty precipices, to arrest the gaze and call forth the acclamation of impulsive multitudes; but in limpid streams, noiseless and gentle, through the deep mountain passes, till the alluvial plains below were made rich and verdant by their fertilizing agency. His father was a respectable yeoman of Belper, Derbyshire county, in a central part of England. The yeomanry of that country form a distinct class, farming their own lands, ordinarily possessing wealth competent for their own necessities; being a desirable mediocrity in society, equally removed, on the one hand, from all in scouted and unmitigated poverty that is degrading and paralyzing; and, on the other hand, from sudden overgrown riches and unnatural rank in social position.

Verily it is no easy matter to write the biography of such a man as Samuel Slater; we mean to write one that will be generally read in a community like ours. It is not denied that we are a business kind of peo ple, proverbially philosophical and shrewd in all matters connected with the acquisition of property; yet, few indeed think of reading the life of a business man. If urged to do it, the response will be interrogatories like the following:-What has he done that is memorable or calculated to interest mankind? Has he made any brilliant discoveries in science? Has the telescope opened to his enraptured vision hitherto undiscovered plan. ets? Have the laboratories of the chemist enabled him to spread upon some broad and distinct panorama new analyses and combinations, and, as it were, new principles in the government of physical nature? Or, has he fought the battles of his country and clothed himself with martial glory? We cannot answer in the affirmative. We admit, that usually in the life of a business man there is not to be expected much incident to arrest the attention of the sleepy and the dull. If he has acquired great wealth; if at home he gives constant employment and consequent subsistence, year after year, to hundreds or to thousands of mechanics and laborers; if, too, the virtuous poor are furnished by him with comfortable

habitations, at rates the most reduced and advantageous; and, if abroad the canvass of his ships whiten every sea, and the merry notes of his gal lant tars enliven every port in the known world; nevertheless his career has been comparatively uniform and monotonous-nothing in it stirring and dazzling, unless it be the grand result, the acquisition of a princely fortune. If now and then a rich cargo, amidst the howling tempest and the upturned elements, sink into the ocean's deep abyss; or if a confla. gration in the dark hour of midnight sweep away whole blocks of houses and stores; these are deemed commonplace occurrences, scarcely deserving recollection. Whatever public sympathy may exist tends to another point. The tenants in being thus frightfully driven from their habitations by the flames bursting in upon them; and the mariners also in struggling for life, when shipwreck deprives them of food and all rational means of safety, do indeed excite a deep sympathy, and a memoir of their perilous sufferings would be read by thousands; while the owner of the wasted property is not mentioned or thought of, except by a few personal friends and the insurance offices.

Such are the natural reflections in reference to the biography of a mer. chant. However, the case of Samuel Slater is somewhat different. For if he hath not like Fulton discovered a new application of principle which has completely changed the social and business relations of the whole world, he has, no one can deny, introduced from a foreign land into our own country and spread over its fair bosom the application of a principle that has already, as with the power of magic, resolved population and wealth into new combinations. What has made the city of Lowell? What is now making the city of Lawrence become a rival sister to her? What has cast the germ of an hundred cities, here and there, all about us in every direction, at present flourishing villages, where only a few years since was a dense forest, the stillness of which has given place to the multitudinous hum of business? The reader scarcely need be told. With the young the story has become a kind of instinct. The hammer and the file of the machine shop, the dizzy whirl of the yarn spindle, and the rattling of the weaver's shuttle, answer the question. Spinning by machinery has mainly done all this. For a moment imagine these germs never to have been thus spread broadcast over our country, and what should we now behold? The answer is obvious. Our wheels of improvement would be set backwards half a century. So far as depending on this portion of our industry is involved, the geographies, the printed statistics, the newspapers printed sixty years ago would tell you with startling accuracy what would now be our condition.

The limits assigned for this article do not admit of much generalizing. They scarcely admit a well connected view of the prominent facts in the life of the individual immediately claiming our attention. He was born June 9th, 1768. We have already alluded to his father, who being in comfortable circumstances, the son received the advantages of a common school education. When at school, he is said to have evinced an inquisitive mental aptitude, for which he was so much noted in subsequent life. With him arithmetic was a favorite branch of study. This conduced to the development of mechanical capabilities, that were the foundation of his principal success through life. And it is justice to remark, that he was indebted only in a small degree for this success to any other cause save intellectual vigor and the most rigid integrity. He was modest and diffi

dent, which with sensible people always command esteem; and was completely destitute of that flippancy and bold pretension, which with many appear to be a substitute for genius. It is doubted if he was ever known to profess knowledge he did not possess, or to control means of any kind unless apparently within his power. We have frequently heard him af firm, that it was his habit through life, and especially in the early portion of it, not to assume pecuniary responsibilities, without calculating at the time the source from which funds would be received to cancel them. This is a trait of character the more to be admired from the rarity of its existence; and a man who possesses it would not be inclined to commence, or to profess an ability to complete a machine, unless he had the perspective powers, that from the beginning would enable him at one glance to survey all its constituent parts. Instances indeed occurred, almost as a matter of course, of failure to receive anticipated means; but, the man who exer. cised such a habit would not remain long without providing new estimates for the redemption of his responsibilities.

It is probably known to our readers that spinning cotton by machinery, in the boyhood of young Slater, was in its infancy. Richard Arkwright, born in 1732, and brought up to the humble trade of a barber, when about 25 years of age turned his attention to machinery-first, we believe, to an attempt for perpetual motion, and then to the object which has immortalized his name, and given benefits to the world of value surpassing all calculation. He soon obtained a patent for spinning cotton and went successfully into the business. In 1771, Jedediah Strutt, the inventor of the machine for making ribbed stockings, formed a copartnership with Ark. wright. Four years afterwards, Mr. Strutt began, on his individual account, the erection of cotton works at Belper, the residence of the Slater family. This prepared the way for the eventful career of young Slater, who, when at the age of fourteen years, became the apprentice of Mr. Strutt, to learn this business; and, by his father's consent, who died about that time, he bound himself with a regular indenture to perform faithfully the customary duties of an apprentice. Who would have then imagined that such a stripling, by this act, laid the foundation for a large fortune in America, and introduced the elements of a business to employ, in his own life-time, probably more than a million of people! It seems more like fancy than reality. What conqueror ever produced a revolution in human society so wide and permanent in its character, as that we are contemplating! A few such boys, each with a corresponding concatenation of circumstances, would revolutionize the whole world.

The signature of young Slater to his indenture, bears a striking resemblance to that written forty years afterwards on the bills of the bank of which he was the president. True, one was the chirography of a boy just from school, and the other of a man of business, and a good penman ; but no one can fail to observe the similarity. To us, this voluntary surrender of himself to Mr. Strutt, under all the legal technicalities in such instruments, is an interesting incident in his life, and was the result of views more comprehensive and collected than is usual with persons of his age. Were it convenient we would give a fac-simile of the indenture, still preserved in the family as a cherished relic of his early life. Just as the world was opening upon him with all its gaudy fantasies, its sensual delights, and its subtle delusions; when the passions were ripening into full vigor, and the imagination was rampant; what an idea for a self de