11 



until, in some financial crisis, credit and commercial 

 standing are swept away, and the latter portion of life, 

 over which had floated so many golded visions of wealth 

 and luxury, and honor and ease, is spent in shinnings 

 and make-shifts, in disappointment and poverty — per- 

 haps in disgrace and actual want. It is not a strange 

 thing for the merchant who has handled millions, whose 

 check has been an " open sesame " before which bank 

 safes swung wide their iron doors and delivered untold 

 amounts of gold, to reach a point in his career, wdiere he 

 would be glad to call his own the humblest cottage and 

 the smallest form, and wishes he had never been tempt- 

 ed from a farmer's peaceful and happy life by the glit- 

 tering promises of commerce. 



We are presenting no imaginary cases. The state- 

 ment was made, some years since, that not more than 

 one New York merchant in ninety, managed to escape 

 failure at some time in the course of his life ; and obser- 

 vation favors the conclusion, that the examples of final 

 and complete success are comparatively few, — that the 

 great body of merchants are forced to battle hard to 

 make the ends of each year meet, even down to the 

 close of their business career -, while many of them end 

 it as clerks, employees and dependents of others. I 

 have seen the man who, at one time, was most widely 

 known among the merchant princes of New York, whose 

 name stood at the head of all subscriptions for charitable 

 objects, and wa» a talisman in the cause of reform, — I 

 have seen him acting as an employee of his former 

 clerks in the very establishment which his own enter- 

 prize and genius had founded and upreared. This is, 

 by no means, a solitary case. 



Mercantile pursuits, however, are not the only ones 



