Thomas Gresham is universally recognised as the model of a citizen, for enlightenment and public spirit. He had a university education; and then, as in natural sequence, served his apprenticeship as a mercer. It was his study and practice of trade that led him to those financial views which were a fortune to his country. He proposed and proved the policy of domestic, in preference to foreign loans; and this was a greater benefit than even the Royal Exchange. Queen Elizabeth could not have chosen him as the host of distinguished foreign visitors unless he had been a gentleman, as well as a man of extensive knowledge, and a skilled financier. It was a great thing for her, and for England, present and future, that there was a Thomas Gresham, three centuries since, “engaged in trade.”
A hundred years later, when the horror of the Plague hung over London like a pall, a merchant who was thus driven from his business, sat at his writing-table in his country house, recording his notions on commercial matters for the public benefit. This was Josiah Child, a London merchant’s second son. The national mind was beginning to grope about in need of some principles of political economy to lay hold of, and Josiah did his best to supply the want. No man could be expected to find the true standpoint at once; and Josiah Child proceeded on the then undisputed ground of the mercantile system, by which money is assumed to be something altogether unlike a commodity which has a relative value in the market. In spite of this fundamental error, there was so much that was wise, true, and fresh in Child’s writings, that he at once took a high place among the distinguished citizens furnished by trade. He might partly confound cause and effect in treating of the benefits of a low rate of interest: he might take a wrong ground in defending the commerce of the East India Company: but he enlarged the public notion of the scope and operation of trade, and took much trouble to communicate his own enlightenment to society. It was he who also put forth proposals about the relief of pauperism, which showed us in what direction to look when reform became necessary. He thought a union better than a parish, and would have made every pauper work; but, seeing the difficulty of the competition with independent industry, he would have sent all paupers to the colonies. It is remarkable that he advocated a plan of centralisation, and would have established a corporate body of Fathers of the Poor, who should have saved every parish the trouble of its paupers.
Josiah understood his own business so well that he grew vastly rich, and married his children into aristocratic families. He was made a baronet at eight-and-forty; and when his third wife died, thirty-six years after him, above fifty great families went into mourning for her. I sometimes fear that the high spirit of the middle class of Englishmen is not altogether what it was,—seeing how aristocratic connection is made an object of serious pursuit. However this may be, it appears that two centuries ago, as now, the highborn do not object to obtain wealth by becoming connected with persons “engaged in trade.”
While Josiah Child was writing in his country house, in the intervals of news about the Plague, the person who was to correct some of his mistakes was entering on manhood under peculiar circumstances. Dudley North, then choosing his course in life, (or having it chosen for him) had lived among the gipsies in his childhood,—having been stolen when his nurse’s back was turned, and well hidden from search. Nothing could ever make a scholar of him, when he was at last found; but his whole soul was alive when there was any bargaining in hand. He was sharp enough at school about other things than his book: so his father bound him to a Turkey merchant, to be sent abroad. He went north and east,—to Archangel and Smyrna; and the world was much amused by the accounts he gave afterwards of what he had seen and observed. He learned the Turkish language, and gave his countrymen the first distinct notions they ever obtained of life in Turkey. More than this, he studied the course of commerce with such an open mind that he discovered the real function of gold and silver money in trade, and made some of his countrymen understand it when he came home, by answering Sir Josiah Child’s doctrine about interest. It was in 1691 that this revelation was made to the mercantile interest in the “Discourse on Trade,” which has placed Sir Dudley North among the early economists of our country.
It was partly at least to his parentage, and to his being brother to the Lord Keeper, that Dudley North owed his consequence in the city, and rose into some high municipal offices: but the same circumstances, and the political opinions which accompanied them, exposed him to vicissitude in the latter days of the Stuarts. If he had not been an enlightened merchant, he would not have been heard of now: whereas we hear of him, not merely as alderman and sheriff, and knight, but as one of those precursors of a great scientific period who, by sagacity, obtain a premature share of the wisdom which is to be disclosed. He stands in our history as the precursor by nearly a century of Adam Smith in one department of his researches; and this was not by closet meditation only, but by bringing strong observant and comparing faculties to bear on commercial topics; so that it was a blessing to his country that the mind early trained to sharpness by gipsy habits, was “engaged in trade.”
Within the last century the leading merchants of all countries have manifested the same characteristics,—the enlightenment, the brave and shrewd enterprise,—which have distinguished their class in all times; and they have obtained the same substantial power and social consideration.
When George III. came to the throne there was a little boy at Frankfort who did not dream of ever having anything to do, personally, with the sovereigns of Europe. He was in the first stages of training for the Jewish priesthood. His name was Meyer Anselm Rothschild. For some reason or other he was placed in a counting-house at Hanover, and he soon discovered what he was fit for. He began humbly as an exchange-broker, and went on to be the banker of the Landgrave of Hesse, whose private fortune he saved by his