“These are very pretty sentiments, Master—­a—­a—­a—­, you bear a worthy name, no doubt, my ingenious commentator on commerce?”

“They call me Seadrift, when they spare a harsher term;” returned the other, meekly declining to be seated.

“These are pretty sentiments, Master Seadrift, and they much become a gentleman who lives by practical comments on the revenue-laws.  This is a wise world, Captain Cornelius Ludlow, and in it there are many men whose heads are tilled, like bales of goods, with a general assortment of ideas.—­Hornbooks and primers!  Here have Van Bummel, Schoenbroeck, and Van der Donck, just sent me a very neatly-folded pamphlet, written in good Leyden Dutch, to prove that trade is an exchange of what the author calls equivalents, and that nations have nothing to do but to throw open their ports, in order to make a millennium among the merchants!”

“There are many ingenious men who entertain the same opinions;” observed Ludlow, steady in his resolution to be merely a quiet observer of all that passed.

“What cannot a cunning head devise, to spoil paper with!  Trade is a racer, gentlemen, and merchants the jockeys who ride.  He who carries most weight may lose; but then nature does not give all men the same dimensions, and judges are as necessary to the struggles of the mart as to those of the course.  Go, mount your gelding, if you are lucky enough to have one that has not been melted into a weasel by the heartless blacks, and ride out to Harlaem Flats, on a fine October day, and witness the manner in which the trial of speed is made.  The rogues of riders cut in here, and over there; now the whip and now the spur; and though they start fair, which is more than can always be said of trade, some one is sure to win.  When it is neck and neck, then the neat is to be gone over, until the best bottom gains the prize.”

“Why is it then that men of deep reflection so often think that commerce flourishes most when least encumbered?”

“Why is one man born to make laws, and another to break them?—­Does not the horse run faster with his four legs free, than when in hopples?  But in trade, Master Seadrift, and Captain Cornelius Ludlow, each of us is his own jockey; and putting the aid of custom-house laws out of the question, just as nature has happened to make him.  Fat or lean, big bones or fine bones, he must get to the goal as well as he can.  Therefore your heavy weights call out for sandbags and belts, to make all even.  That the steed may be crushed with his load, is no proof that his chance of winning will not be better by bringing all the riders to the same level.”

“But to quit these similies,” continued Ludlow, “if trade be but an exchange of equivalents——­”