British court a memorial setting forth the claims of the inhabitants of Guypuscoa to fish in those seas, The Board of Trade, in a letter addressed to Lord Dartmouth, denied such a right, and gave orders to the British cruisers to drive them from the ground. To make this prohibition still stronger, and to finally settle the claim of Spain, an article was inserted in the treaty of 1760 by which Spain, in direct terms, conceded every right she had in the fisheries of Newfoundland.

The case of France we have before spoken of, and nothing thus far but the mighty power of that nation and its hatred of England, has preserved those fisheries, which they deem of inestimable value.

We now come to her conduct towards the colonies, before colonial jealousy or Tory confiscation had induced her to turn her attention towards us, for the purpose of depriving us of our fisheries. Although as early as 1635, the government refused to declare in favor of a free fishery, still the act of 1651 was the first severe blow to the colonies, especially as it regarded the article of fish, for by it no colonial fish could be exported from the mother country, nor could the colonies legally export it from their own ports. Yet in defiance of this act, we still continued our trade; and though it was reenacted in 1660, still we set at defiance its provisions, as we have before shown by the extract from "Jocelyn's Voyage," who says, that in 1660, we had considerable Commerce with Lisbon, Marseilles, and many other parts in southern Europe. In addition to the restrictions of this bill, a duty was levied on all colonial fish sent to England; and in 1705, an act was passed excluding us from the Newfoundland fisheries. And thus, down to the act of 1775, which annihilated all Commerce and trade with the mother country, and which ordered the seizure of our fishing vessels, it will be seen she endeavored to suppress and destroy them, for by their success, her own citizens were alarmed for the continuance of the fisheries of England; and, more than all, she saw in them the foundation of a mighty maritime power, that some day might become, as it has, the rival of the mistress of the

seas.

And this fact leads us to the consideration of the value of the fisheriesnot as a capital, not as a source of profit, but as the foundation of a nation's mercantile trade; and, though we are confident that we cannot present any new fact as regards this important branch of trade, still the reiteration of its value cannot be amiss, especially when our fisheries are in danger. From the time when Holland ordered public prayers for her "great and small fisheries," and Raleigh sought to awaken the jealousy of England in regard to them; from the time when Sir William Petty defined one of the three sources of a nation's greatness to be its fisheries, and Postlethwaite asserted that by them France had risen to be a naval power sufficiently strong to set at defiance the navies of England and Holland; from the time when Hamilton urged their value as an incentive to forming the American Union, -we say, from these earlier and later times, every writer and every statesman has expatiated on the value of all fisheries as a means of enlarging and extending a nation's mercantile and naval marine. The novelty of the pursuit, the variation of the duty, the nearness to our shore-all render it more inviting to the landsman than any other branch of Commerce. From this pursuit, after they have become inured to the sea and its dangers, they enter the more extended and difficult branch of the coasting or foreign trade; and from this shipping engaged in the fishery, come our ablest seamen and most enlightened masters and mates.

Thus, we see the fisheries of England in 1775, producing yearly 3,000 fresh sailors; and apply the same rule to ours, and it gives a nursery to draw from sufficiently fruitful to man yearly over 300 new ships, which add yearly to our tonnage to the amount of 366,000 tons. With this facility for supplying the increased demand for sailors, comes another advantage of great national importance. We mean the reserve it gives us for manning the navy in case of war. Of all classes that are affected by war, none feel it so quickly as the fishermen, and none are so interested in its successful operations and speedy termination. Deprived of their employment by war, they seek, by becoming participants in it, to hasten its close, and at the same time enrich themselves by it. The histories of our revolutionary and last was show the firm reliance we may place on them, and the glory they ever bring on the American name. Long may it be ere a single right of theirs shall be endangered or ceded to a foreign power.

From the very bosom of the fisheries have sprung up such republics as Genoa, Venice, Holland, and America; and no prouder compliment was ever paid to any people than that paid by Jocelyn, who said of the American fishermen in 1666, that they were great sticklers for liberties; and our early history shows that the first people who set at defiance the mother country, were the fishermen, who, in spite of "Navigation Acts," traded to Lisbon, Marseilles, and Bordeaux. The spirit that then animated them still exists, and there is scarcely a page in American history but that tells of the spot that is baptized with their blood; and no eulogy, however eloquent, can do justice to their bravery, honor, and self-sacrificing virtue. Shall they be sacrificed, and the mercantile power of our country, which is soon to outstrip that of the boasted "mistress of the seas," be crippled in its infancy and dishonored in its youth? We believe every American citizen will give an emphatic "no," and pronounce a doom on that administration that proposes to sacrifice even the shadow of their rights.

Spain with its poverty, Portugal with its degradation, and Holland with its weakness, stand as a warning to any temporizing policy, and cry out, in the language of our revolutionary fathers, "No truce without the fisheries!" Let us contend only for our natural rights, and never yield that liberty of fishing that gave to the colonists a thousand sail, and in our day to us 4,000,000 tonnage. We may deteriorate in virtue, lose our jealous watchfulness of liberty-but so long as we keep this nursery of seamen, this school of heroes, our great essential rights will be secure, for from them shall spring Commerce, with its unnumbered sails, and every canvas that shivers in the gale shall fan and quicken freedom's never-dying flame.

Art. III.-MERCANTILE LIBRARY ASSOCIATIONS.*

AMONG the many associative efforts abounding in our principal cities, MERCANTILE LIBRARY ASSOCIATIONS have come, within a few years, to occupy a very conspicuous position; and whether as regards their respectability of character, the objects of their foundation, or the sphere and degree of their influence, none have better title to such eminence. Certainly no social invention within the century, the object of which has been the improvement of Young Men, has been attended with results more auspicious; and, perhaps no class-institution has ever been established in the country, the good influences of which were so generally diffused throughout the whole community. It is not merely capable and intelligent merchants that they have assisted to produce; for, beside being mercantile seminaries, they have proven excellent schools for the formation of general character. They have done much to produce wise and good men-to enlarge the general conceptions and strengthen the general understanding of the young-to foster practical talent, and facilitate the progress of enterprise, irrespective of their particular direction. They have tended, even, to develop well-proportioned characters in professions regarded, usually, as completely dissevered from either mercantile pursuit or study-such as politics and literature. Even religion is not without indebtedness to them, apart from their conservative influence upon the morals of society. Nor are they singular in this respect; for the very process of enlarging the mind, although the means by which it is effected may aim at some peculiar development, may yet elicit a disposition toward some other very different product. Such is the frequent result observed in other educative institutions.

It would seem that the principle of association among young men, for the purposes of mutual improvement, ought to have been carried to a much further degree than has ever been attained. Perhaps, from the erroneous idea of the superior dignity of the field, an ambition to figure upon the noblest theater, and an egotism entirely fatal to the true inspiration of teacher and benefactor, an undue proportion, as it seems to us, of the energy that seeks to reform and improve, has ever been lavished upon the comparatively barren soil of prime manhood. How many have expended whole life-times in hopelessly declaiming against errors and faults so firmly grained into the gnarled tree as to be past eradication. To attempt any radical reform in full-grown men is one of the least promising tasks that can be essayed; mere improvement can be but slowly effected, and to a degree very limited; and it is, indeed, a labor of itself, even to arrest and combine their attention. But youth is quite another material. The attention of the young is easily drawn, and so active is then the social principle, that association with them is spontaneous. They have a perpetual tendency to collective action -to illustrate which, suppose a meeting upon any ordinary subject to be called. The same stimuli of glaring advertisements and flaming posters, the same activity of drummers and committee-men, the same square yards

Thirty-second Annual Report of the Board of Direction of the Mercantile Library Association, in the City of New York, January, 1853.

Thirty-third Annual Report of the Mercantile Library Association of Boston, 1853.

Eighteenth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Young Men's Mercantile Library AsBociation of Cincinnati, Jan. 4, 1853.

Sixth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Mercantile Library Association of St. Louis, January, 1852.

of banner and pints of oil, which would drag out any given number of men of above thirty-five years of age, would assemble twice that number of twenty-five, and three times as many of eighteen years, and this relatively, too, to the numbers of each age addressed. Understanding so well these facts, how is it that the philanthropists of capital and the philanthropists of action, have always, to such a degree, preferred the desert to the region so susceptible under cultivative care?

What makes this neglect more singular is the fact, that of the evils reulting from association, nine-tenths of their whole influence is exercised directly upon the class in question. If vice and error had their work upon the young to accomplish by perpetually renewed effort through the whole individual series, or if they found them in a state as disjoined as that in which they are met by the influences of truth and morality, their success would be so contemptible that the young might be almost left to themselves. But these agents always avail themselves of the associative propensity to achieve the purpose that would be else hopeless. They concentrate their own power in order that the pernicious emanation may affect numbers at a single exercise. The hilarious squad,-the associations formed for public benefit and private pleasure and pride,—the fun-loving audience, seeking the real tragedy of the murder of time-it is upon these, especially, that vice, error, and frivolity, make their blandishments felt. It is not that their presence is so seductive that they have so much opportunity with the young, but that companionship is more so. The dangers which in this way assail young men, at every point, have not been unseen nor unopposed. Volume upon volume of virtuous diatribe has been published-countless essays upon the comparative fruits of truth and error, of virtue and vice, of wisdom and folly, of sobriety and intemperance, of industry and idleness, of reason and of vanity, have been scattered about as free as the air-tracts full of burning appeals, written as with the pen of Isaiah, or with a tenderness of advice as amiable as the spirit of Fenelon, have been showered upon the winds as thick as the autumnal leaves upon the brooks of Vallambrosa. And why has the result of these efforts been so much as if addressed to those winds, instead of to human understanding? Because they have sought isolated influence-have endeavored to expel from the grain the ef fect received in the mass-have even sought the desired cure by the violence to nature of endeavoring to restrict the associative principle, to divide young-manhood into a series of disconnected individualities, lodged like prisoners to the state, in their appropriate series of cells. They say to the young man, fly from the gilded saloon, avoid the haunt of pleasure, go not to the ball-room, abandon the noxious atmosphere and the lewd exhibitions of the theater. But where do they tell the young man to go. They talk to him of the comforts to be found at home-that is, in a city like this, they consign him to the fascinations of a boarding-house-they expatiate on the pleasures of reading, which raises in his mind the enticing idea of an entire solitude, between the end of a day's work and bed-time, spent in a close chamber, with a single chair, a dim lamp, on a small table, and a Pilgrim's Progress, or a Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles. They extol the advantages and delights of reflection, and he wonders why another color than blue cannot be equally friendly to human well-being. Then these benevolent gentlemen fall into a despair at the failure of their efforts, the half of which is wounded pride at beholding the impotency of their finished rhetoric, and talk of the total depravity of human nature, visible so

fearfully in life so early. Why, do they not see that to counteract evils which are nourished in association, associative good should be cultivated? That to the full degree in which men gather to meet evil influences, should be established congeries for the action of the opposing principle? Were the agencies for promoting virtue among the young as numerous as those devoted to vice, and provided with counter-seductions as wide and varied as the allurements of the latter, their influence would be irresistible. Most people, either young or old, do not love folly of any sort, for itself, and would never resort to it, were they furnished with other means to avoid ennui.

No institutional ideas having the benefit of mankind in view have met with less objection, or are in themselves really more free of objectionable trait, than those designed for the moral and intellectual improvement of the young. The projectors of philanthropic schemes having reference to general society, have been often virulently assailed and their efforts doggedly resisted; but the founders of institutions devoted to the wants of youth, have almost always enjoyed a happy exemption from all such attacks. So much are the young the objects of solicitude to the parent generation, that all forbear to assail efforts well intended for their benefit, lest in so doing they should be the means of depriving youth of a possible good they might attain. In nothing are the professions of men so generally and easily credited as in their plans for the good of the young. It seems to be understood that all have one feeling in this matter--that all are here honest,—that no man could be governed by base or unworthy motives in his actions within this sphere. The only men we know of who might object to Young Men's Improvement Associations, are some persons who regard the cohesive tendency in modern society as far too predominant; who are in fear, perhaps, for the integrity of their own self-isms, and who are alarmed at the anticipation that there will be no more marked individualisms standing out above the level of the race; that there will be no more heroes, no more geniuses, no more man-divinities; nothing in the whole waste of human form to worship; that the race will sink to a Procrastean conglomeration, moved by the monotonous force of a stupid practicalism, and utterly without the magnetism to impinge its shadow upon the page of history. But we see no hope for these other than to nourish tenderly their own individuality, and await, as patiently as they may, the general result.

There are now existing in the United States, Mercantile Library Associations, formed on a nearly similar plan, in the cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, S. C., Cincinnati, and St. Louis; beside, institutions in other places, having some of the general features of these, and as nearly resembling them as the character of the places in which they exist would permit. That of Boston is the oldest, having been incorporated March 11, 1820. The idea was at that time quite novel, and of course, the beginning and the progress for a considerable period were very moderate. The clerks were then regarded as, above most classes, thoughtless, improvident, and careless of any solid attainments. How they would use the funds intrusted to them, and how far the result would do credit to the sagacity of the merchant-founders, were, certainly, serious questions at that time. But no city of the United States was so well adapted as Boston, where general education is so well attended to, and where the clerks are, or were then, so much more than in other great cities, under the control of parents, guardians, and employers, to make the first experiment. It