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Lecture Seventh.

PRINCIPALS AND CLERKS.

THERE are two very different aspects in which a great mercantile establishment may be contemplated. You may enter one of these establishments, and as you pass from room to room and loft to loft, and survey the enormous piles of goods, the regiment of clerks, porters, and packers, the throng of customers, the activity and commotion and amicable strife of tongues, which meet you on every side, your whole impression of the scene may concentrate in the feeling—“What a display of enterprise! What a generous capital! What a thriving business!" While the friend who is at your side, with far other eyes penetrating the materialism of the spectacle, may be wholly engrossed with the reflection, "What a school is this for the training of the heart! How rapidly must the tenantry of this busy hive, principals and subordinates of every grade, be ripening for glory or for shame!" These views are not incompatible: one

does not necessarily exclude the other. But with very many merchants, unfortunately, the secular quite neutralizes and absorbs the spiritual view. It is the habit of the commercial world to look at the little community which peoples one of these great warehouses in its exclusively business relations. The tie which binds the inmates together, is simply a tie of convenience or of interest. The principal employs the requisite staff of men to do his work: the work is done, and they receive their wages: and this is the whole of it. But if the BIBLE is to have a voice in the matter, there must be elements recognized in the organization which impress upon it a much higher character. You cannot, with "the law and the testimony" in your hands, sink the man in the merchant. There is nothing in your avocation to absolve you from such divine enactments as these: "Whether, therefore, ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God." "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." "As we have, therefore, opportunity, let us do good unto all men.' "To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin." These precepts are as binding in the Counting-room as in the homestead; in your commercial, as in your domestic, households. And if you will but allow them their just weight, they will impregnate your trafficking with a leaven of righteousness, and make

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it no less a ministration of usefulness than a means of wealth.

It will be no strange thing, if this should prove, to many merchants, an unwelcome topic. The idea of assuming a responsibility over the moral training of their subordinates, has scarcely occurred to them. They have cares and anxieties enough already: how can they find time to look after the morals of their young men? —But let it abate the displeasure awakened by this suggestion, to reflect that you are moulding the characters of these young men, whether you will or not. Providence has placed them, for the time being, under your roof, and you are shaping their principles. They will no more leave your establishment as they entered it, than your sons will come home from Yale or Princeton, the same unsophisticated youths they were when their mother, four years ago, imprinted her farewell kiss upon their cheeks, and sent them forth to share the advantages and the dangers of a college-life. The process of education is going on in the one case with as little interruption as in the other; and the question for you to ponder, is, not whether you will direct this process in your counting-house, but how you will direct it.

And here it is very affecting to consider how many mercantile firms there are, under whose administration the wholesome principles which the young men

in their employ brought with them from their homes, undergo a sad deterioration. It is not that these firms have any deliberate purpose of corrupting the morals of their clerks; but the commodious virtue which presides in their warehouses, makes this result unavoidable. "You must assuredly know that a certain quantity of what has been called shuffling, has been introduced into the communications of the trading-world—insomuch that the simplicity of yea, yea, and nay, nay, is in some degree exploded; there is a kind of understood toleration established for certain modes of expression, which could not, we are much afraid, stand the rigid scrutiny of the great day; and there is an abatement of confidence between man and man, implying, we doubt, such a proportionate abatement of truth as goes to extend most fearfully the condemnation that is due to all liars, who shall have their part in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone. And who can compute the effect of all this on the young and yet unpractised observer? Who does not see, that it must go to reduce the tone of his principles; and to involve him in many a delicate struggle between the morality he has learned from his catechism and the morality he sees in the counting-house; and to obliterate, in his mind, the distinctions between right and wrong; and at length, to reconcile his conscience to a sin which,

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like every other, deserves the wrath and curse of God; and to make him tamper with a direct commandment in such a way, as that falsehoods and frauds might be nothing more, in his estimation, than the peccadilloes of an innocent compliance with the practices and moralities of the world?"* The first stage in this downward process, is, to familiarize the mind of a youth with the conventional deceptions of trade with its flexible dialect and its equivocal usages. Then let him begin to practise these lessons himself. And, finally, let him undertake, as he will be prepared to do, to initiate his juniors into the mysteries of this artificial code, under which words are no longer the signs of ideas, and veracity becomes a mere item of the Price-Current. This point attained, and he will be qualified to assume the functions of a principal, and direct the moral training of as large a corps of clerks as his own business may require.

I come at once to this topic, because it is no part of my plan to discuss in detail the reciprocal duties appertaining to this relation. I cannot, for example, enlarge on the subject of wages-a very important subject surely, and one which it belongs to the character of a true merchant to consider and adjust, with

Dr. Chalmers.