398 Tradesman and Merchant — Commercial Population 



while yet in the master's service. The law of supply and demand 

 likely determined somewhat the rate of premium.^ 



After the apprenticeship of seven years was completed the enfran- 

 chised usually served the master a few years abroad as factor before 

 they began buying and selhng on their own account.- Those who 

 did not go abroad moved to the suburbs of London and set up as 

 retailing shopkeepers.^ 



The rigidity in the practice and the insistence upon apprenticeship 

 in the mercantile world declined in the eighteenth century.'* This 

 was particularly true among the tradesmen. Campbell, writing in 

 1747, scorned the idea of asking learners to serve seven years' appren- 

 ticeship in such simple trades as retail shopkeeping, and names many 

 in which it was entirely unnecessary. Defoe also noticed that the 

 old-time sense of duty that existed betw^een master-merchant and 

 apprentice was decadent.^ Fewer noblemen's sons were apprenticed 

 in the midst of the century than in former times: contemporaries 

 ascribed this to the lower profits realized in general by merchants — 

 causing a decline in the attractiveness of the occupation — and to the 

 influence of the standing army, whereby the fashion changed and the 

 noble families put their sons in the army rather than into merchan- 

 dizing.^ This trend toward freedom and accommodation of practice 

 to actual commercial advantage and away from the arbitrary inter- 

 ference of government in trade was in line with the general tendency 

 of the century. 



In the quotation from Burke above, a virtue ascribed to the mer- 

 chant was a deep sense of commutative justice. An international 

 code of commercial law had arisen and was founded on the practices 

 of honor and justice to which the mercantile world had been accus- 

 tomed. An early writer ascribed the same importance that Burke 

 did to the fairness and squareness with which the English merchants 

 treated their foreign customers and for which they endeavored to 

 establish and maintain a reputation.'^ The same idea was the root 

 of the use of trade-marks, so prevalent among the early merchants, 

 and of the high respect which the civil and common law accorded to 



1 For the above data, see, J. B., Interest of Gr. Br., 83; Defoe, Com. Eng. Tr., 

 107-8, 111-13; "Discourse about Trade," 87. 



2 North, Lives, II, 349; Savary, Par. Negoc, 118-121. 

 ' '/Advantages of Enlarging To\vns," 9-10. 



* Besant, Tudor London, Ch. V. 



5 Defoe, Com. Eng. Tr., I, 10. 



« Gent. Mag., 1732: 1015, 1021; 1733: 1014-l.S. 



" Roberts, Map, 258-62. 



