Port of London Society for the Spiritual Benefit of Sailors brought into active operation. To the ship, and the general objects of the society, Mr. Smith contributed, from first to last, about £3,000. Another society, called into existence by Mr. Thompson’s activity and Christian devotedness and liberality, was the Home Missionary Society, which was inaugurated at the London Tavern on August 11th, 1819. At that time Mr. Thompson resided at Brixton Hill, and on week-day evenings held religious meetings amongst the neglected poor of that district and of Streatham. Gas-lights and police being then unknown, Mr. Thompson’s family were thankful when he came home from these charitable peregrinations safe and sound. It must be remarked here that Mr. Thompson was one of the founders, in 1827, of the Merchant Seamen’s Orphan Asylum. The first election was for five boys only, but it soon became a large and flourishing institution. Though a Dissenter, the Pastoral Aid and Special Services Aid Societies owed him much. As his daughter truly writes of him—“Mr. Thompson was one of those who helped to mould the benevolent character of the age in which he lived.” Another name, well known in religious circles, was that of the late Mr. Thomas Wilson, who was the first to begin chapel-building on a large scale in London. Even in our more ostentatious day, Mr. Wilson’s charities would be considered princely. And here, for the present, we take leave of the Christian merchant princes of London—the righteous men who possibly may have preserved it from the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the great mediæval cities of the continent, it was the men who had made money by trade who were the first to spend it liberally for the promotion of art, and the benefit of charity and religion. It has been so in London. Our Norman barons, our men with pedigrees running up to the time of the Conqueror, have done little for the welfare of the people, compared with the men of humble birth, who, as they have grown in wealth, have also grown in their estimate of its power to help those lower in the social scale than themselves. CHAPTER II. ACROSS THE ATLANTIC.