"commission," for the agility with which he trips up a rival and gets
ahead of him, for the keenness of his scent as he noses a customer and
discovers the sport where he can get off his wares.

How many great qualities must such a man possess! You will find in all
countries many such diplomats of low degree; consummate negotiators
arguing in the interests of calico, jewels, frippery, wines; and often
displaying more true diplomacy than ambassadors themselves, who, for
the most part, know only the forms of it. No one in France can doubt
the powers of the commercial traveller; that intrepid soul who dares
all, and boldly brings the genius of civilization and the modern
inventions of Paris into a struggle with the plain commonsense of
remote villages, and the ignorant and boorish treadmill of provincial
ways. Can we ever forget the skilful manoeuvres by which he worms
himself into the minds of the populace, bringing a volume of words to
bear upon the refractory, reminding us of the indefatigable worker in
marbles whose file eats slowly into a block of porphyry? Would you
seek to know the utmost power of language, or the strongest pressure
that a phrase can bring to bear against rebellious lucre, against the
miserly proprietor squatting in the recesses of his country lair?
--listen to one of these great ambassadors of Parisian industry as
he revolves and works and sucks like an intelligent piston of the
steam-engine called Speculation.

"Monsieur," said a wise political economist, the
director-cashier-manager and secretary-general of a celebrated
fire-insurance company, "out of every five hundred thousand francs
of policies to be renewed in the provinces, not more than fifty
thousand are paid up voluntarily. The other four hundred and fifty
thousand are got in by the activity of our agents, who go about among