very oldest cities of the world, and its very name means a "seat of trade." We are told in the Scriptures, that Abraham about 2000 years before Christ went up out of Egypt "very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold," and the only possible way he could have acquired these possessions was by buying and selling. He afterwards purchased the cave and the field in Hebron for a family burial-place, and "weighed unto Ephron the silver which he had named in the audience of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant." We may notice here, that there were then "merchants" as a class, that silver by weight passed as "money" from hand to hand, and that in the lack of written deeds to land, as we have them, sales were "made sure" before the faces of living men, who would tell the truth and pass on the word. Abraham indeed seems to have given the pitch for the song of trade sung by his descendants, the Jews, from that day to this; for Jacob, his grandson, was a skilled trafficker, not to say a secret trickster, in his bargains; and wherever in the Old World or the New the Jews have been, there have been in fact and in fame busy buyers and sellers.

But the Jews have had no special privileges in the realm of trade; on the contrary, they have always been under special disabilities both legal and social. Even in England, the most liberal country in Europe, they were exiled for long periods, maltreated at all points of contact with other people, more or less put under the ban of the Common and the Statute law, often outrageously taxed on their goods and persons, and studiously kept out of the paths of highest public employment even down to a time within the memory of living men.[1] Yet so natural is the impulse to trade, so universally diffused, so imperative also if progress is in any direction to be attained, that the English and all other peoples were as glad to borrow money, that is, buy the use of it, of the persecuted Jews, as the latter were to get money by buying and selling other things, and then to loan it, that is, sell the use of it, under the best securities (never very good) for its return with interest, that they could obtain. Happily, the mutual gains that always wait on the Exchanges even when their conditions are curtailed, of course attended the mutilated exchanges between Jews and Christians: otherwise, they would not continue to take place.

Christianity, however, as the perfected Judaism, gradually brought in the better conditions, the higher impulses, and the more certain rewards, of Trade, all which, we may be sure, were designed in the divine Plan of the world. What is called the Progress of Civilization has been marked and conditioned at every step by an extension of the opportunities, a greater facility in the use of the means, a more eager searching for proper expedients, and a higher certainty in the securing of the returns, of mutual exchanges among men. There have been indeed, and there still are, vast obstacles lying across the pathway of this Progress in the unawakened desires and reluctant industry and short-sighted selfishness of individuals, as well as in the ignorant prejudices and mistaken legislation of nations; but all the while Christianity has been indirectly tugging away at these obstacles, and Civilization has been able to rejoice over the partial or complete removal of some of them; while also Christianity directly works out in human character those chief qualities, on which the highest success of commercial intercourse among men will always depend, namely, Foresight, Diligence, Integrity, and mutual Trust; so that, what we call Civilization is to a large extent only the result of a better development of these human qualities in domestic and foreign commerce.

Contrary to a common conception in the premises, the sacred books of both Jews and Christians display no bias at all against buying and selling, but rather extol such action as praiseworthy, and also those qualities of mind and habits of life that lead up to it and tend too to increase its amount, and they constantly illustrate by means of language derived from traffic the higher truths and more spiritual life, which are the main object of these inspired writers. It is indeed true that the chosen people of God were forbidden to take Usury of each other, though they were permitted to take it freely of strangers, and that they were forbidden to buy horses and other products out of Egypt, for fear they would be religiously corrupted by such commercial intercourse with idolaters; but there is nothing of this sort in the law of Moses that cannot be easily explained from the grand purpose to found an agricultural commonwealth for religious ends, in which commonwealth no family could permanently alienate its land, and in which it was a great object to preserve the independence and equality of the tribes and families. Throughout the Old Testament there is no word or precept that implies that trade in itself is not helpful and wholesome; there were sharp and effective provisions for the recovery of debts; there were any number of exhortations to diligence in business, such as, "In the morning sow thy seed, and at evening withhold not thy hand"; King Solomon himself made a gigantic exchange in preparation for the temple with King Hiram of Tyre, by which the cedars of Lebanon were to be paid for by the grain and oil of the agricultural kingdom; chapter xxvii of the prophet Ezekiel is a graphic description of the commerce of the ancient world as it centered in the market of Tyre, a description carried out into detail both as to the nations that frequented that market and as to the products that were exchanged in it,—"silver, iron, tin, lead, persons of men, vessels of brass, horses, horsemen, mules, horns of ivory, ebony-wood, carbuncles, purple work, fine linen, corals, rubies, wheat, pastry, syrup, oil, balm, wine of Helbon, white wool, thread, wrought iron, cassia, sweet reed, cloth, lambs, rams, goats, precious spices, precious stones, splendid apparel, mantles of blue, embroidered work, chests of damask, and gold"; and chapter xxxi of Proverbs describes the model housewife in terms like these,—

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