II. Merchant-manufacturers, who deal in labor applied to transforming that material. They buy labor, wool, cotton, silk, water-privileges and steam-power, to sell them all in finished cloth.
III. Merchant-traders, who simply distribute the article raised or manufactured. These three divisions I shall speak of as one body. Property is accumulated labor; wealth or riches a great deal of accumulated labor. As a general rule, merchants are the only men who become what we call rich. There are exceptions, but they are rare, and do not affect the remarks which are to follow. It is seldom that a man becomes rich by his own labor employed in producing or manufacturing. It is only by using other men's labor that any one becomes rich. A man's hands will give him sustenance, not affluence. In the present condition of society this is unavoidable; I do not say in a normal condition, but in the present condition.
Here in America the position of this class is the most powerful and commanding in society. They own most of the property of the nation. The wealthy men are of this class; in practical skill, administrative talent, in power to make use of the labor of other men, they surpass all others. Now, wealth is power, and skill is power—both to a degree unknown before. This skill and wealth are more powerful with us than any other people, for there is no privileged caste, priest, king, or noble, to balance against them. The strong hand has given way to the able and accomplished head. Once head armor was worn on the outside, and of brass, now it is internal and of brains.
To this class belongs the power both of skill and of wealth, and all the advantages which they bring. It was never so before in the whole history of man. It is more so in the United States than in any other place. I know the high position of the merchants in Venice, Pisa, Florence, Nuremberg and Basel, in the middle ages and since. Those cities were gardens in a wilderness, but a fringe of soldiers hung round their turreted walls; the trader was dependent on the fighter, and though their merchants became princes, they were yet indebted to the sword, and not entirely to their calling, for defence. Their palaces were half castles, and their ships full of armed men. Besides those were little States. Here the merchant's power is wholly in his gold and skill. Rome is the city of priests; Vienna for nobles; Berlin for scholars; the American cities for merchants. In Italy the roads are poor, the banking-houses humble; the cots of the laborer mean and bare, but churches and palaces are beautiful and rich. God is painted as a pope. Generally in Europe, the clergy, the soldiers, and the nobles are the controlling class. The finest works of art belong to them, represent them, and have come from the corporation of priests, or the corporation of fighters. Here a new era is getting symbolized in our works of art. They are banks, exchanges, custom-houses, factories, railroads. These come of the corporation of merchants; trade is the great thing. Nobody tries to secure the favor of the army or navy—but of the merchants.
Once there was a permanent class of fighters. Their influence was supreme. They had the power of strong arms, of disciplined valor, and carried all before them. They made the law and broke it. Men complained, grumbling in their beard, but got no redress. They it was that possessed the wealth of the land. The producer, the manufacturer, the distributor could not get rich: only the soldier, the armed thief, the robber. With wealth they got its power; by practice gained knowledge, and so the power thereof; or, when that failed, bought it of the clergy, the only class possessing literary and scientific skill. They made their calling "noble," and founded the aristocracy of soldiers. Young men of talent took to arms. Trade was despised and labor was menial. Their science is at this day the science of kings. When graziers travel they look at cattle; weavers at factories; philanthropists at hospitals; dandies at their equals and coadjutors; and kings at armies. Those fighters made the world think that soldiers were our first men, and murder of their brothers the noblest craft in the world; the only honorable and manly calling. The butcher of swine and oxen was counted vulgar—the butcher of men and women great and honorable. Foolish men of the past think so now; hence their terror at orations against war; hence their admiration for a red coat; their zeal for some symbol of blood in their family arms; hence their ambition for military titles when abroad. Most foolish men are more proud of their ambiguous Norman ancestor who fought at the battle of Hastings—or fought not—than of all the honest mechanics and farmers who have since ripened on the family tree. The day of the soldiers is well-nigh over. The calling brings low wages and no honor. It opens with us no field for ambition. A passage of arms is a passage that leads to nothing. That class did their duty at that time. They founded the aristocracy of soldiers—their symbol the sword. Mankind would not stop there. Then came a milder age and established the aristocracy of birth—its symbol the cradle, for the only merit of that sort of nobility, and so its only distinction, is to have been born. But mankind who stopped not at the sword, delays but little longer at the cradle; leaping forward it founds a third order of nobility, the aristocracy of gold, its symbol the purse. We have got no further on. Shall we stop there? There comes a to-morrow after every to-day, and no child of time is just like the last. The aristocracy of gold has faults enough, no doubt, this feudalism of the nineteenth century. But it is the best thing of its kind we have had yet; the wisest, the most human. We are going forward and not back. God only knows when we shall stop, and where. Surely not now, nor here.
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.
In virtue of its strength and position, this class is the controlling one in politics. It mainly enacts the laws of this State and the nation; makes them serve its turn. Acting consciously or without consciousness, it buys up legislators when they are in the market; breeds them when the market is bare. It can manufacture governors, senators, judges, to suit its purposes, as easily as it can make cotton cloth. It pays them money and honors; pays them for doing its work, not another's. It is fairly and faithfully represented by them. Our popular legislators are made in its image; represent its wisdom, foresight, patriotism and conscience. Your Congress is its mirror.
This class is the controlling one in the churches, none the less, for with us fortunately the churches have no existence independent of the wealth and knowledge of the people. In the same way it buys up the clergymen, hunting them out all over the land; the clergymen who will do its work, putting them in comfortable places. It drives off such as interfere with its work, saying, "Go starve, you and your children!" It raises or manufactures others to suit its taste.