Hardly less is the present physical state of our great cities felt by that numerous class which is, next to the employer, the most important in a city. I mean the shopmen, clerks, and all the men, principally young ones, who are employed exclusively in the work of distribution. I have a great respect, I may say affection, for this class. In Bristol I know nothing of them; save that, from what I hear, the clerks ought in general to have a better status here than in most cities. I am told that it is the practice here for merchants to take into their houses very young boys, and train them to their business; that this connection between employer and employed is hereditary, and that clerkships pass from father to son in the same family. I rejoice to hear it. It is pleasant to find anywhere a relic of the old patriarchal bond, the permanent nexus between master and man, which formed so important and so healthful an element of the ancient mercantile system. One would gladly overlook a little favouritism and nepotism, a little sticking square men into round holes, and of round men into square holes, for the sake of having a class of young clerks and employés who felt that their master’s business was their business, his honour theirs, his prosperity theirs.
But over and above this, whenever I have come in contact with this clerk and shopman class, they have impressed me with considerable respect, not merely as to what they may be hereafter, but what they are now.
They are the class from which the ranks of our commercial men, our emigrants, are continually recruited; therefore their right education is a matter of national importance.
The lad who stands behind a Bristol counter may be, five-and-twenty years hence, a large employer—an owner of houses and land in far countries across the seas—a member of some colonial parliament—the founder of a wealthy family. How necessary for the honour of Britain, for the welfare of generations yet unborn, that that young man should have, in body, soul, and spirit, the loftiest, and yet the most practical of educations.
His education, too, such as it is, is one which makes me respect him as one of a class. Of course, he is sometimes one of those “gents” whom Punch so ruthlessly holds up to just ridicule. He is sometimes a vulgar fop, sometimes fond of low profligacy—of betting-houses and casinos. Well—I know no class in any age or country among which a fool may not be found here and there. But that the “gent” is the average type of this class, I should utterly deny from such experience as I have had. The peculiar note and mark of the average clerk and shopman, is, I think, in these days, intellectual activity, a keen desire for self-improvement and for independence, honourable, because self-acquired. But as he is distinctly a creature of the city; as all city influences bear at once on him more than on any other class, so we see in him, I think, more than in any class, the best and the worst effects of modern city life. The worst, of course, is low profligacy; but of that I do not speak here. I mean that in the same man the good and evil of a city life meet. And in this way.