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OF

AMERICAN MERCHANTS.

BY FREEMAN HUNT, A. M

EDITOR OF THE MERCHANTS' MAGAZINE, ETC., ETO.

VOL. I.

NEW YORK:

DERBY & JACKSON, 119 NASSAU-STREET.

CINCINNATI:-H. W. DERBY & CO.

1858.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1857,

BY FREEMAN HUNT,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern

District of New York.

R. C. VALENTINE, STEREOTYPER AND ELECTROTYPER, 81, 83, and 85 Centre-street, NEW YORK.

GEO. RUSSELL & CO., BOOK AND WOOD-CUT PRINTERS, 61 Beekman-street, N. Y.

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PREFACE.

WE have lives of the Poets and the Painters; lives of Heroes, Philosophers, and Statesmen; lives of Chief-Justices and Chancellors. There is a class of men whose patronage of art has been princely in its munificence, as their wealth has equalled that of princes, whose interests have become a chief concern of statesmen, and have involved the issues of peace and war; whose affairs afford a leading subject of the legislation of States, and fill the largest space in the volumes of modern jurists. This class has produced men who have combined a vast comprehensiveness with a most minute grasp of details, and whose force of mind and will in other situations would have commanded armies and ruled states: they are men, whose plans and combinations take in every continent, and the islands and the waters of every sea; whose pursuits, though peaceful, occupy people enough to fill armies and man navies; who have placed science and invention under contribution, and made use of their most ingenious instruments and marvelous discoveries in aid of their enterprises; who are covering continents with railroads and oceans with steamships; who can boast the magnificence of the Medici, and the philanthropy of Gresham and of Amos Lawrence; and whose zeal for science and zeal for philanthropy have penetrated to the highest latitude of the Arctic seas, ever reached by civilized man, in the ships of Grinnell.

Yet no one has hitherto written the Lives of the Merchants. There are a few biographies of individuals, such as the life of Gresham; but there is no collection of such lives which, to the merchant and the merchant's clerk, would convey lessons and present appropriate examples for the conduct of his business life, and be to him the “Plutarch's Lives" of Trade; while for the historical student the lives of the Merchants of the world, and the history of the enterprises of trade, if thoroughly investigated, would throw much light upon the pages of history.

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