stigma to the most useful and important trades. The landowner, the
soldier, the priest, these three were pure from every stain of
degradation, and only these three were quite absolutely and ethereally
pure. Next to them came the lawyer and the physician, on whom there
rested some traces of the lower earth; so that although the youthful
baron would fight or preach, he would neither plead nor heal. And after
these came the lower professions and the innumerable trades, all marked
with stigmas of deeper and deeper degradation.

From the intellectual point of view these prejudices indicate a state of
society in which public opinion has not emerged from barbarism. It
understands the strength of the feudal chief having land, with serfs or
voters on the land; it knows the uses of the sword, and it dreads the
menaces of the priesthood. Beyond this it knows little, and despises
what it does not understand. It is ignorant of science, and industry,
and art; it despises them as servile occupations beneath its conception
of the gentleman. This is the tradition of countries which retain the
impressions of feudalism; but notwithstanding all our philosophy, it is
difficult for us to avoid some feeling of astonishment when we reflect
that the public opinion of England--a country that owes so much of her
greatness and nearly all her wealth to commercial enterprise--should be
contemptuous towards commerce.

I may notice, in passing, a very curious form of this narrowness. Trade
is despised, but distinctions are established between one trade and
another. A man who sells wine is considered more of a gentleman than a
man who sells figs and raisins; and I believe you will find, if you
observe people carefully, that a woollen manufacturer is thought to be a
shade less vulgar than a cotton manufacturer. These distinctions are
seldom based on reason, for the work of commerce is generally very much
the same sort of work, mentally, whatever may be the materials it deals
in. You may be heartily congratulated on the strength of mind, firmness
of resolution, and superiority to prejudice, which have led you to
choose the business of a cotton-spinner. It is an excellent business,
and, in itself, every whit as honorable as dealing in corn and cattle,
which our nobles do habitually without reproach. But now that I have
disclaimed any participation in the stupid narrowness which despises
trade in general, and the cotton-trade in particular, let me add a fe