The commercial traveller, a personage unknown to antiquity, is one of
the striking figures created by the manners and customs of our present
epoch. May he not, in some conceivable order of things, be destined to
mark for coming philosophers the great transition which welds a period
of material enterprise to the period of intellectual strength? Our
century will bind the realm of isolated power, abounding as it does in
creative genius, to the realm of universal but levelling might;
equalizing all products, spreading them broadcast among the masses,
and being itself controlled by the principle of unity,--the final
expression of all societies. Do we not find the dead level of
barbarism succeeding the saturnalia of popular thought and the last
struggles of those civilizations which accumulated the treasures of
the world in one direction?

The commercial traveller! Is he not to the realm of ideas what our
stage-coaches are to men and things? He is their vehicle; he sets them
going, carries them along, rubs them up with one another. He takes
from the luminous centre a handful of light, and scatters it broadcast
among the drowsy populations of the duller regions. This human
pyrotechnic is a scholar without learning, a juggler hoaxed by
himself, an unbelieving priest of mysteries and dogmas, which he
expounds all the better for his want of faith. Curious being! He
has seen everything, known everything, and is up in all the ways
of the world. Soaked in the vices of Paris, he affects to be the
fellow-well-met of the provinces. He is the link which connects the
village with the capital; though essentially he is neither Parisian
nor provincial,--he is a traveller. He sees nothing to the core: men
and places he knows by their names; as for things, he looks merely at
their surface, and he has his own little tape-line with which to
measure them. His glance shoots over all things and penetrates none.