He was silent for a few moments, and the sob of his wife came upon his ear.
“I have long since forgiven,” said Arthur Lygon.
Laura raised her head, and one look, such as should have been on his face, would have brought her with one rush to his arms. But the look was not there. She did not move.
“I have fully forgiven,” repeated Arthur. “Let the children come.”
Mrs. Hawkesley had not waited for the second word. A hurried cry of young voices without, a wilder cry from a mother’s voice within, and for a moment, at least, that mother was happy.
REPRESENTATIVE MEN.
Merchants.
the polos : sir josiah child : sir dudley north : the rothschilds : john jacob astor.
In the study of human life, as in ordinary human intercourse, we find fun and mournfulness always together; and there is scarcely a trait of human character which has not at once an amusing and a pathetic side. For one instance, very striking to an observer of modern English society, there is something as ridiculous as it is melancholy in the contempt which the vulgar of the professional classes parade for commercial occupations. To any one who knows what commerce has done for the world, and what sort of citizens the great merchants of the world have made, there is something ludicrous and painful at once in hearing the family of a provincial surgeon, or lawyer, thanking Heaven that they are not connected with anybody “engaged in trade.” Youths and maidens of such families, and not only they but their elder relatives, escape from the charge of pride by alleging that commercial people are narrow-minded and money-grubbing; that their occupations tend to keep them ignorant, and to make them selfish, underbred, and unpatriotic. The landed interest, as we used to call it, had an equally contemptuous notion of the merchants, some time ago, though not on exactly the same grounds. The prejudice has given way, partly through the family alliances entered into by landed dignity and commercial wealth, and yet more by the introduction of the principles and methods of business into the practice of agriculture. Since our great landowners have learned that agriculture is the manufacture of food and other original products, they have begun to perceive the value and beauty of those economical principles and methods which are supposed by apothecaries’ sons and attorneys’ daughters to vulgarise the mind, and render traders of any rank unfit company for classes which have no interest in saleable commodities. If any one of my readers should be disposed to doubt whether such a view is really entertained in English society, let him take pains to learn what is felt and said in classes outside of his own,—whatever that may be : and he will find that Bonaparte’s declaration that we are “a nation of shopkeepers,” is still considered the most cutting thing he could have said; and that there is everywhere, from Belgravia to the village of two or three hundred inhabitants, an assumption of gentility and enlightenment on the part of divinity, law, and physic, which commerce finds it hard to despise. It is not to be denied that the aristocratic illusions of the professional classes are kept up by the characteristic faults of the commercial order, as, for instance, the political cowardice which is the conspicuous vice of the manufacturers and merchants of many countries at this day; but, when it comes to picking holes in one another’s coat, every class has some success against its neighbour, and there is no profession which has not its besetting sin. The one which seems to beset them all is the ignorant pride with which they regard a vocation which wise men of all orders know how to respect.
It may help some of us to a right point of view to glance at two or three of the Representative Men of the commercial class, and see what they were like, and what they did.
The first who gives us any full and clear impression of the European merchant of the Middle Ages is particularly interesting to us just now, as the first European who ever entered China Proper. The Venetian family of the Polos afford an admirable example of their order; and Marco is the one we care most about, because he recorded what he did and saw.
In 1255 Marco Polo was playing about in the halls and balconies of one of the beautiful palaces of proud Venice,—the great city by which Europe itself was known at the ends of the earth. The boy was becoming old enough to be told about his father, whom he had never seen. He had an uncle Marco; and he had a mother who told him, as he grew able to understand, that his father and his other uncle, Maffio, were men of noble minds, who wished to extend the commerce of Venice, and to make out whether some fresh countries might not be visited, and induced to exchange commodities with a people who could fetch and carry the productions of all known lands and seas. In 1250, the father and uncle had gone to Constantinople, where they had bought precious stones, as the most convenient article to carry into unknown regions; and from thence it was understood that they had gone into Scythia. Beyond this, there was nothing to tell. Scythia meant everything beyond the route that commerce took on the Euxine. Nobody knew what it was like, or how far it spread, or what was the end of it. Ghengis Khan came forth from it; and there was a prevalent belief that a magnificent potentate dwelt in a country of singular wealth where the world ended in that direction; but there were no means of knowledge, and there was no use in going over such maps as there were at that day. Land and sea were set down by guess; and nobody yet dreamed of a passage by the south of Africa, or of the existence of the western half of the globe. Little Marco and his mother could only put together all they had heard of wild animals and strange birds, and wonderful commodities, and terrible warriors, with armies of horses (horses being almost as strange as elephants to the people of Venice;)—the Polos could only speculate and imagine, and desire and pray that the