Now the merchants in America occupy the place which was once held by the fighters and next by the nobles. In our country we have balanced into harmony the centripetal power of the government, and the centrifugal power of the people: so have national unity of action, and individual variety of action--personal freedom. Therefore a vast amount of talent is active here which lies latent in other countries, because that harmony is not established there. Here the army and navy offer few inducements to able and aspiring young men. They are fled to as the last resort of the desperate, or else sought for their traditional glory, not their present value. In Europe, the army, the navy, the parliament or the court, the church and the learned professions offer brilliant prizes to ambitious men. Thither flock the able and the daring. Here such men go into trade. It is better for a man to have set up a mill than to have won a battle. I deny not the exceptions. I speak only of the general rule. Commerce and manufactures offer the most brilliant rewards--wealth, and all it brings. Accordingly the ablest men go into the class of merchants. The strongest men in Boston, taken as a body, are not lawyers, doctors, clergymen, book-wrights, but merchants. I deny not the presence of distinguished ability in each of those professions; I am now again only speaking of the general rule. I deny not the presence of very weak men, exceedingly weak in this class; their money their only source of power.
The merchants then are the prominent class; the most respectable, the most powerful. They know their power, but are not yet fully aware of their formidable and noble position at the head of the nation. Hence they are often ashamed of their calling; while their calling is the source of their wealth, their knowledge, and their power, and should be their boast and their glory. You see signs of this ignorance and this shame: there must not be shops under your Athenæum, it would not be in good taste; you may store tobacco, cider, rum, under the churches, out of sight, you must have no shop there; it would be vulgar. It is not thought needful, perhaps not proper, for the merchant's wife and daughter to understand business, it would not be becoming. Many are ashamed of their calling, and, becoming rich, paint on the doors of their coach, and engrave on their seal, some lion, griffin, or unicorn, with partisans and maces to suit; arms they have no right to, perhaps have stolen out of some book of heraldry. No man paints thereon a box of sugar, or figs, or candles couchant; a bale of cotton rampant; an axe, a lapstone, or a shoe hammer saltant. Yet these would be noble, and Christian withal. The fighters gloried in their horrid craft, and so made it pass for noble, but with us a great many men would be thought "the tenth transmitter of a foolish face," rather than honest artists of their own fortune; prouder of being born than of having lived never so manfully.