Commerce is a great power in the world. It not only does more to keep the peace than any, or perhaps all, other agencies, but in great measure it gives law to the world.

Itself created and stimulated by the necessities of life and the national craving for property, power, and dominion, it not only maintains its own life and place in the world, but has compelled all civilized nations to come into acquaintance, correspondence and intimacy.

It is the handmaid of religion. It cultivates our faith. What more beautiful instance can be named, of the confidence which man has in his fellows, in the truth of human statements and the honesty and honor of human conduct, than the willingness with which he places his entire fortune at the absolute disposal of men on the other side of the globe; he has never seen them and perhaps never expects to,he has heard of them, as we hear of matters belonging to another life, and he commits to them ship-loads of his most costly possessions in full confidence that they will be received with care, disposed of with skill and fidelity, and that faithful returns will reach and enrich him.

In addition to these more quiet, though perhaps not less potent influences, commerce speaks in the thunder of British cannon, when China, in pursuance of an exclusive and narrow policy, which had nothing better than a hoary antiquity to commend it to human favor,-refuses trade or intercourse.

Incidentally it results from this, that one-third of our race are opened up to the aggressive mission of Christianity. It is commerce which compels the anchorage of British and American fleets at Japan. Commercial necessities originated the negotiation which resulted in our treaty with that people, and, by treaty or by force, the commercial necessities of the great powers of the world will eventually compel even that most exclusive of the nations of the earth to recognize the common brotherhood of man, and the obligation binding nations as well as individuals to observe the laws of social life and national comity.

Man has certain general and permanent wants, instincts and desires, which, rather than bare ideas, abstractions, and metaphysics, give rise to moral, and other laws, governing individual life.

So man, aggregated and combined into national organizations, has, still, similar instincts, wants and desires, which originate and mould and perfect International and Commercial Law. These instincts, wants and desires, have never been so intelligently directed as at the present time.

Individual greatness has towered more conspicuously than it does to-day, or ever, in the nature of things, can be expected to do again; but the universal average intelligence of the race is much higher at this time than ever before.

In the days of her glory, Athens, then the queen city of Greece, had her Pericles in the senate, and her Phidias in the arts;-Rome had her great men, lifted high above the common average of national intelligence;-and from these wonderful specimens of individual growth and greatness, have come down to us works in almost every department of life. In philosophy and oratory; in art and in law; the writings of Aristotle and Plato, of Socrates and of Seneca ; the speeches of Demosthenes and of Cicero; the statuary of Phidias, ("Sculptor of the Gods"), of Michael Angelo, and of Leonardo Da Vinci; the paintings of Raphael and of Titian; the code of Justinian, and, at a later day, the code of the first and greatest Napoleon. These have been, and must forever be, the wonder and the glory of humanity.

But what was the average advancement and intelligence of the nations in which these remarkable men lived, and wrought, and died?

Socrates paid the penalty of superior intelligence by draining the cup of hemlock.

Phidias languished and died in prison, because his countrymen fancied a resemblance between some of the figures. of the Gods, which he had wrought in his beautiful marbles, and the sculptor and his friend Pericles.

For this "impiety" he died in prison and in disgrace; and

we thank his stupid and envious countrymen that they spared his divine works.

DaVinci, great in both departments of the arts, and equal, if not superior, to any man of his time,-solicited employment of a Duke at a salary of $500 a year.

The codes of Justinian and Napoleon have come to us;a store house of improved reason and refined learning, from which the commercial and other laws of our day have drawn most valuable treasures; they are monuments of the greatness of their authors, and of their absolute supremacy over the men of their time.

How different from all this is the story of the growth of modern law, and especially of the Commercial Law of the present time.

It is the result of the common and universal intelligence of the merchants and traders, of the business men in every department of life, who originate, stimulate and control the practical affairs by which the human race, to-day, lives and makes progress.

The commercial law of our time is not the monument of the wisdom of any man, or set of men. While it owes much to such men as Mansfield and Stowell in England, to Valin, Pothier, and Emerigon upon the continent, and to our own Marshall, and Story, and Kent, it is after all, in point of fact, a system built up by the merchants, traders, and business. men of very modern time, with but little aid from courts or legislatures.

Courts, when expounding and declaring commercial law, have in very many instances only impressed with a judicial sanction, or deduced proper and reasonable consequences from, those regulations, which the experience of the trader, whether borrowing from others or inventing himself, had already adopted as the most convenient.

Legislatures, wisely reflecting that commercial men are notoriously the best judges of their own interests, have interfered as little as possible with their avocations, and have shackled trade with very few of those restrictions and for

malities which are mischievous, if only on account of the waste of time occupied in complying with them.

Commercial law, as to-day administered throughout the world, is mainly the growth of the last three centuries; and it is, of all laws the world has ever known, the most completely the offspring of usage and convenience, and the least fettered by legislative regulations.

In other countries and at an earlier day the law enforced, by many and anxious regulations, the keeping of a correct account by a merchant. In our day, the legislature wisely leaves that, and many kindred duties, to be enforced solely by public opinion, and by the dread of that reproach and loss of credit, which follows the detection of any form of negligence or irregularity of that kind.

It is perhaps owing greatly to this, that we find such high and peculiar sentiments of commercial honor prevalent among the leading business men of our country and of the world.

Those who early engaged in trade discovered that the law had few rules for the government of their transactions, and deemed it necessary to adopt some regulations for their own government. Thus, they erected a sort of mercantile republic; and the observance of their rules is secured, less by the law of the land, than by the force of opinion and the dread of censure. It is this, which protects the American consignor of goods to the remotest agent in some uncivilized seaport of an East Indian island, where law, as enacted by legisla tion and enforced by judicial sanction and penalty, could give them no remedy against fraud and peculation.

In speaking of commercial law, as being the outgrowth and embodiment of the usages, customs and convenience of merchants, I do not mean that all customs and usages are necessarily and of course a part of the law of the land.

It is the general, open, notorious, and long-continued customs of merchants, which become in time a part of the law merchant:-no witness would be required to prove such a custom; judges and courts take notice of it judicially, i. e., without evidence. In that case, the custom has the force of law.

In another case, a custom may be so partial and limited, as to apply to a contract only because it is to be considered a part of the contract. In the last case, the party setting up the custom, and claiming that it shall govern the construction of his contract, must prove not only that the custom exists, but, that it is so general, so old and well established, and so widely known and recognized, that a jury would believe, as a matter of fact, that the custom was in the minds of the parties at the time they made their contract, and that they made it with reference to the custom.

To illustrate-If parties contract in the English language, they will of course generally be bound by the common meaning of the words they used. But, it would be manifestly unjust to permit one of them to bind the other by this common meaning, if it could be shown that they and their neighbors, dealing in such matters, had uniformly and for many years used the same language with a special and different meaning.

Thus, in England, a party contracting to leave 1000 rabbits in a warren was held bound to leave 1200, because it was proved to the satisfaction of the jury that, as to rabbits, 1000 in that neighborhood meant 1200. So, a baker's dozen was at one time thirteen. So, when an employer in New York contracts to pay $3 a day for a certain kind of work, if the workman should labor twelve hours within each twentyfour, and could prove that in that trade and by universal custom ten hours constituted a "day's work," the employer would be obliged to pay $3.60 for such a day's work, i. e., for every twelve hours. So, in some parts of the country a ton is in certain trades, (e. g., coal and iron,) 2240 lbs.

In the first case,-i. e., when the custom has the force of law, suppose I promise you, by my note in writing on the 22d day of March, to pay to you or your order $1000 in 30 days from that date: the general law, arising from the common use of language, would decide that the money must be paid (there being 31 days in March) on the 21st of April,but here a custom, which after ages of acknowledgment and practice has acquired the force of recognized law, comes in,