All departments of business in Louisville are transacted upon a very large scale. It is perhaps the greatest fault in the commercial character of the city that everything is conducted upon too large a scale. There is, to use a painter's phrase, too much of outline and too little in detail. The wealth and importance of cities depends less upon the great than upon the small dealers and manufacturers; these latter are content with doing each a small and careful business which may gradually rise to be of vast extent, and which will thus really improve and profit the city more than the mighty efforts of the large dealer. In Louisville, however, none are contented to do a little business. The feeling seems to exist that mercantile or manufacturing pursuits are respectable just in proportion to the capital employed in them, and the desire of every one seems to be to attain a high point of respectability. Louisville greatly lacks that class of inhabitants, so useful to a city, who are content to attain wealth by careful and laborious means, who can commence with the basket of apples and gradually work up to the proud proprietorship of extensive ware-houses or factories. There is everywhere prevalent among those who should seek to rise gradually, a desire to place themselves at once in a rank with the largest dealers. It is the small dealer and the small manufacturer, who is content to rise by his own efforts, unaided by factitious means of any sort, who is needed here. There is abundant room and abundant work for such, their advent is courted; and, if they will avoid the characteristic desire for extensive business relations and be content to seek their fortunes by pains-taking progress, their success is infallibly certain. It has already been remarked that the aggregate amount of sales in any one department of business divided by the number of houses engaged in that business would show a very large result. In this statement reference is had only to those exclusively wholesale houses, whose sales are made to dealers. No exclusively retail houses of any sort are placed in the enumeration, though the sales of many of the retail stores would fully equal, if indeed they did not exceed, some of the wholesale houses. The difficulty of reaching any proper account of the retail business will, however, prevent any notice being taken of it in this volume.