This is an operation: You send forth a man not given to drink and consequently chatter to Amsterdam, another not given to drink and chatter to New Orleans, another n. g. t. d. and c. to Bordeaux, Cadiz, Canton, Liverpool, Japan, and where not, all with secret instructions. Then at an appointed day all the men n. g. t. d. and c. begin gradually, secretly, cannily, to buy up in all those places all the lac-dye or something of the kind that you and I thought there was about thirty pounds of in creation. This done mercator raises the price of lac-dye or what not throughout Europe. If he is greedy and raises it a halfpenny a pound, perhaps commerce revolts and invokes nature against so vast an oppression, and nature comes and crushes our speculator. But if he be wise and puts on what mankind can bear, say three mites per pound, then he sells tons and tons at this fractional profit on each pound, and makes fourteen thousand pounds by lac-dye or the like of which you and I thought creation held thirty or at most thirty-two pounds. These men are the warriors of commerce; but its smaller captains, watching the fluctuations of this or that market, can often turn a thousand pounds ere we could say J. R. Far more than a thousand pounds have been made in a year by selling pastry off a table in the Boulevards of Paris. In matters practical a single idea is worth thousands. This nation being always in a hurry paid four thousand pounds to a man to show them how to separate letter-stamps in a hurry. “Punch the divisions full of little holes,” said he, and he held out his hand for the four thousand pounds; and now test his invention, tear one head from another in a hurry, and you will see that money sometimes goes cheaper than invention. A single idea is sometimes worth a thousand pounds in a book, though books are by far the least lucrative channels ideas run in; Mr. Bradshaw's duodecimo, to wit--profit seven thousand pounds per annum. A thousand pounds! How many men have toiled for money all their lives, have met with success, yet never reached a thousand pounds. Eight thousand servants, fed and half clothed at their master's expense, have put by for forty years, and yet not even by aid of interest and compound interest and perquisites and commissions squeezed out of little tradesmen and other time-honored embezzlements, have reached the rubicon of four figures. Five thousand little shopkeepers, active, intelligent and greedy, have bought wholesale and sold retail, yet never mounted so high as this above rent, housekeeping, bad debts and casualties. Many a writer of genius has charmed his nation and adorned her language, yet never held a thousand pounds in his hand even for a day. Many a great painter has written the world-wide language of form and color, and attained to European fame, but not to a thousand pounds sterling English.