man takes more pains to be poor than others
do to grow rich.

There, on the other hand, he sees G.D., a plodding, weak-headed, but
laborious wretch, of a confined genius, and that cannot look a quarter
of a mile from his shop-door into the world, and beginning with little
or nothing, yet rises apace in the mere road of business, in which he
goes on like the miller's horse, who, being tied to the post, is turned
round by the very wheel which he turns round himself; and this fellow
shall get money insensibly, and grow rich even he knows not how, and no
body else knows why.

Here he sees F.M. ruined by too much trade, and there he sees M.F.
starved for want of trade; and from all these observations he may learn
something useful to himself, and fit to guide his own measures, that he
may not fall into the same mischiefs which he sees others sink under,
and that he may take the advantage of that prudence which others rise
by.

All these things will naturally occur to him, in his conversing among
his fellow-tradesmen. A settled little society of trading people, who
understand business, and are carrying on trade in the same manner with
himself, no matter whether they are of the very same trades or no, and
perhaps better not of the same--such a society, I say, shall, if due
observations are made from it, teach the tradesman more than his
apprenticeship; for there he learned the operation, here he learns the
progression; his apprenticeship is his grammar-school, this is his
university; behind his master's counter, or in his warehouse, he learned
the first rudiments of trade, but here he learns the trading sciences;
here he comes to learn the _arcana_, speak the language, understand the
meaning of every thing, of which before he only learned the beginning:
the apprenticeship inducts him, and leads him as the nurse the child;
this finishes him; there he learned the beginning of trade, here he sees
it in its full extent; in a word, there he learned to trade, here he is
made a complete tradesman.

Let no young tradesman object, that, in the conversation I speak of,
there are so many gross things said, and so many ridiculous things
argued upon, there being always a great many weak empty heads among the
shopkeeping trading world: this may be granted without any impeachment
of what I have advanced--for where shall a man converse, and find no
fools in the society?--and where shall he hear the weightiest things
debated, and not a gre