26 A. LIVERSIDGE. 



Commercial Education. — During the past few years we have 

 been hearing a great deal about commercial education, and steps 

 have been taken here by the Chamber of Commerce to promote 

 and provide such education ; but, although the matter is com- 

 paratively new to us, elaborate systems of commercial education 

 have long been established, not only in various European countries- 

 but in Japan. The subject of professional commercial education 

 is not only interesting to commercial men and certain educational 

 institutions, but even to statesmen like Lord Salisbury, Mr. 

 Chamberlain, and Lord Rosebery, who have all three drawn 

 forcible attention to the urgent necessity there is for the training 

 of the British merchant, so that he may maintain his position in 

 the world. Unless something is done to enable him to meet his 

 foreign competitors with equal educational and scientific weapons 

 or equipment, it is thought by a few pessimists that it will soon 

 be a question not whether he is to be one of Britain's proverbial 

 merchant princes, but whether he is to exist at all. I think that 

 this something can be effected, not necessarily by copying German, 

 American, or Japanese methods, but by devising English methods 

 for English needs, i.e., we must work out our own salvation, as- 

 we have done in other cases, and can do again. 



We were once taunted with being a nation of shopkeepers, but 

 that was from envy of our wealth and resources ; not that we 

 deserve the taunt more than others, for the instinct for petty 

 trading is probably, from what I have seen, more marked in many 

 other countries than in our own. It has long been the aim of 

 certain countries to acquire a knowledge of our commercial 

 methods, and to emulate our successes, and for this purpose it is 

 well known that numbers of foreigners take service in London 

 offices at nominal pay, to the detriment of our own commercial 

 men ; the present systems of foreign commercial education had 

 their origin in this same desire to compete with us, and now we 

 are in danger of being surpassed in a department in which we 

 formerly stood first. 



It may be asked what have the members of this Society to do 

 with commercial education 1 I think that our members have a 



