ve come out of their times, and have thought it no
dishonour to their blood.

To bring this once more home to the ladies, who are so scandalised at
that mean step, which they call it, of marrying a tradesman--it may be
told them for their humiliation, that, however they think fit to act,
sometimes those tradesmen come of better families than their own; and
oftentimes, when they have refused them to their loss, those very
tradesmen have married ladies of superior fortune to them, and have
raised families of their own, who in one generation have been superior
to those nice ladies both in dignity and estate, and have, to their
great mortification, been ranked above them upon all public occasions.

The word tradesman in England does not sound so harsh as it does in
other countries; and to say _a gentleman-tradesman_, is not so much
nonsense as some people would persuade us to reckon it: and, indeed, as
trade is now flourishing in England, and increasing, and the wealth of
our tradesmen is already so great, it is very probable a few years will
show us still a greater race of trade-bred gentlemen, than ever England
yet had.

The very name of an English tradesman will, and does already obtain in
the world; and as our soldiers by the late war gained the reputation of
being some of the best troops in the world, and our seamen are at this
day, and very justly too, esteemed the best sailors in the world, so the
English tradesmen may in a few years be allowed to rank with the best
gentlemen in Europe; and as the prophet Isaiah said of the merchants of
Tyre, that 'her traffickers were the honourable of the earth,' (Isaiah,
xxiii. 8.)

In the meantime, it is evident their wealth at this time out-does that
of the like rank of any nation in Europe; and as their number is
prodigious, so is their commerce; for the inland commerce of
England--and it is of those tradesmen, or traffickers, that I am now
speaking in particular--is certainly the greatest of its kind of any in
the world; nor is it possible there should ever be any like it, the
consumption of all sorts of goods, both of our own manufacture, and of
foreign growth, being so exceeding great.

If the English nation were to be nearly inquired into, and its present
opulence and greatness duly weighed, it would appear, that, as the
figure it now makes in Europe is greater than it ever made before--take
it either in King Edward III.'s reign, or in Queen Elizabeth's, which
were th