The United States are certainly the land of promise for the labouring
class. What a contrast between our Europe and America! After landing
in New York, I thought every day was Sunday, for the whole population
that throngs Broadway seemed to be arrayed in their Sunday's best.
None of those countenances ghastly with the privations or the foul
air of Paris; nothing like our wretched scavengers, our ragmen, and
corresponding classes of the other sex. Every man was warmly clad
in an outer garment; every woman had her cloak and bonnet of the
latest Paris fashion. Rags, filth, and suffering degrade the woman
even more than the man; and one of the most striking features in the
physiognomy of the United States, is, undeniably, the change which
has been introduced, in the train of the general prosperity, into
the physical condition of women.[DF] The earnings of the man being
sufficient for the support of the family, the woman has no other duties
than the care of the household, a circumstance still more advantageous
for her children than for herself. It is now a universal rule among
the Anglo-Americans, that the woman is exempt from all heavy work,
and she is never seen, for instance, taking part in the labours of
the field, nor in carrying burdens.[DG] Thus freed from employments
unsuited to her delicate constitution, the sex has also escaped that
hideous ugliness and repulsive coarseness of complexion which toil and
privation every where else bring upon them. Every woman here has the
features as well as the dress of a lady; every woman here is called
a lady, and strives to appear so. You would search in vain among the
Anglo-Americans, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to that of the
Mississippi, for one of those wretched objects, who are feminine only
with the physiologist, in whom our cities abound, or for one of those
haggish beldams that fill our markets and three fourths of our fields.
You will find specimens of the former class only among the Indians
and negroes, and of the latter, only among the Canadian French and
Pennsylvania Germans; for their women labour at least as much as the
men. It is the glory of the English race, that they have ever and every
where, as much as possible, interpreted the superiority of the man
to the woman, as reserving to the former the charge of the ruder and
harder forms of toil. A country in which woman is treated according to
this principle presents the aspect of a new and better world.
Figure to yourself an Irish peasant, who at home could scarcely earn
enough to live on potatoes, who would look upon himself as a rich man
if he owned an acre of ground, but who, on stepping ashore at New York,
finds himself able to earn a dollar a day by the mere strength of his
arm. He feeds and lodges himself for two dollars a week, and at the end
of a fortnight he may have saved enough to buy ten acres of the most
fertile land in the world. The distance from New York to the West, is
great, it is true; but the fare on the great canal is trifling, and
he can easily pay his way by the work of his hands. It is also true,
that the poorest Irishman would not think of buying so little as ten
acres; the least that one buys in the West is eighty. What of that?
The savings of a few months will enable him to compass them; besides,
_Uncle Sam_ favours emigrants, and if, in theory, he does not sell his
land on credit, he is, in fact, very indulgent to the pioneer who comes
to subdue the savage wilderness, and he allows him to occupy the soil
temporarily without charge. Thus the Irish, who would go to fisticuffs
with any body for denying in their presence that the isle of Erin was
a terrestrial paradise, and who, under the inspiration of whiskey,
sing the glories of that _first pearl of the sea_, quit it by fifty
thousands for the United States. On their arrival, they cannot believe
their own eyes; they feel of themselves to find out whether they are
not under some spell. They do not dare to describe to their friends in
Europe the streams of milk and honey that flow through this promised
land.[DH]
Even in this section of the country, where the workman in the towns
and the labourer in the country, instead of being as in the North the
sovereigns of the country, are slaves, there is more plenty, more
physical comfort among the labouring class than is found amongst
us. The coloured population, therefore, increases in numbers faster
than our rural population. Not that our peasant gives birth to
fewer children than the blacks of Virginia and Carolina; but death,
led by the hand of want, is active in keeping down the excessive
multiplication of arms that would soon become formidable competitors
of the fathers, and in closing forever mouths that would cry for
bread which their parents could not supply. The attention of the
benevolent in Europe has long been directed towards the reduction of
the public expenditures, and a more equal distribution of the burden of
taxation, as a means of improving the condition of the poor; but all
these plans, supposing them to succeed according to the views of the
projectors, would merely amount to taking a few coppers less from the
pockets of the poorer class. Whilst a system of measures concerted in
such a manner as to diffuse among them a love of order and habits of
regularity and industry, to enlarge the field of labour, and to render
its terms more favourable to them, would have the effect to fill those
pockets. The relief of one class of the community by merely shifting
its burden to the back of another, has a revolutionary character
which ill agrees with the notions of a generation that is weary of
revolutions, or with the nature of a government established for the
very purpose of staying the revolutionary flood; on the contrary, all
that develops the resources of industry is in harmony with the present
leaning of all minds. Labour is an admirable instrument of concord, for
all interests gain by the prosperity of industry. This is the pure and
true source of all wealth, public and private. Labour alone creates;
and it is it alone that can relieve the wants of the needy, without
impoverishing him who has enough, or even reducing the luxury of the
opulent; that can give wealth to some, competency to others, and to all
_the fowl in the pot_, which, since the revolt of Luther, has been the
great social problem in the material order of things.
The admirable prosperity of the United States is the fruit of
labour, much more than of any reform in taxation. The soil has not
the luxuriant fertility of the tropical regions; roasted larks fly
into nobody's mouth; but the American is a model of industry. This
country is not a second edition of the Greek and Roman republics; it
is a gigantic commercial house, which owns its wheat-fields in the
Northwest, its cotton, rice and tobacco plantations in the South, which
maintains its sugar works, its establishments for salting provisions,
and some good beginnings of manufactures, which has its harbours
in the Northeast thronged with fine ships, well built and better
manned, by means of which it undertakes to carry for the world, and to
speculate on the wants of all nations. Every American has a passion
for work, and the means of gratifying it. If he wishes to cultivate
the ground, he finds waste land enough for his farm in the Northwest
or the Southwest. If he chooses to be a mechanic, that he may finally
become a manufacturer, he has no difficulty in getting credit; he
finds unemployed waterfalls all along the rivers, of which he takes
possession, and on which he sets up his wheels. If he has a taste for
commerce, he puts himself into the hands of a merchant, who after some
years of apprenticeship and trial, sends him to take charge of his
business in the interior, or to the Antilles, or South America, or
Liverpool, or Havre, or Canton. He may labour without apprehension,
and produce without stint; having no rent to pay, his flour, his salt
provisions, fear no competition in the markets of South America and the
sugar islands. As for cotton, the United States alone almost supply the
world, and he cannot plant enough. The career open to the Americans, as
active, bold, and intelligent merchants, is unlimited, and is entered
with admirable spirit and success; they beat their rivals, even the
English, on every field. If the American devotes himself to some branch
of domestic industry, here he finds ample room for activity, for the
home consumption is indefinite; every body here enjoys himself, or at
least spends. Every one produces much, because all consume much; each
consumes freely, because he gains freely, has no fears for the morrow
neither for himself nor his children, or at least takes no thought for
it.
The most efficient measures of the public administration for the
amelioration of the condition of the people in France, would be such
as would tend to increase the industrial qualities of the mass, and
to furnish them with the means of putting these qualities in action;
such are, a system of industrial education; the establishment of
institutions of credit, which should place within the reach of all,
the instruments of industry, or, in other words, capital, which is
now inaccessible not only to the operative and the labourer, but to
a great proportion of the _bourgeoisie_; the execution of a complete
system of routes of communication, from village roads to railroads,
for manufactures and commerce are impracticable where facilities
of transportation do not exist; the modification of many laws and
customs, judicial and administrative, that now embarrass industry,
without being of the least advantage in any point of view.
I dare hardly speak of popular education, where I now am. The people
in the Southern States, are slaves. The maxim here is that they need
no instruction; to instil into them a sentiment of fear is the only
moral nature suitable to their condition. They have, therefore, no
other education than that of their own hands, and that, of course,
must be limited, because their intellectual and moral nature is in
fetters. In the Northern States, the labouring classes are whites, and
there the law makes a liberal provision for popular instruction. Almost
every where in the North, all the children go to the primary schools.
Elementary education is there of a more practical character than with
us; it is our primary instruction, with the omission of the ideal,
and the addition of some instruction in commercial and economical
affairs; but there is no practical industrial education here except by
apprenticeship. There are no mechanical or agricultural seminaries. It
is not thought necessary here to shut up the young in such institutions
to inspire them with a taste for commerce, agriculture, or the
mechanical arts; they suck it in with their mother's milk; they breathe
the air of industry under the paternal roof, in the places of public
resort, in the public meetings, every where, at all times, and in every
act of life. When an American wishes to learn a trade, he goes into
the workshop, the counting-house, the manufactory, as an apprentice.
By seeing others act, he learns how to act himself; he becomes an
artisan, a manufacturer, a merchant; all the faculties of his firm and
watchful mind, all the energies of his ambitious spirit are centred in
his workshop or warehouse. He directs all his powers to making himself
master of his business, to learn the lessons of others' experience,
and he succeeds of course, as every one does who obeys the voice of
his destiny. I do not pretend that the Americans are right in not
having recourse to a theoretical preparation for a particular branch
of business, for which we have instituted such costly establishments.
I only record the fact, with the observation that they get on very
well without it. Our national character has little disposition for
business; we work from necessity and not from choice. Our ideas have
little of a commercial or mechanical turn. To make a Frenchman a
skilful husbandman, an able merchant, a dexterous mechanic, a long and
painful training is necessary; he must change his natural bent, and
metamorphose all his thoughts and habits; in a word, with us a special
professional education must precede apprenticeship. The American learns
by example merely; we must learn by general principles; we stand more
in need of them, and we have a greater aptitude for mastering them,
than they.
* * * * *
Before passing to the institutions best suited to develop industry,
I would observe that a political system which should be particularly
calculated to create and sustain them, cannot be taxed with
materialism. Industry influences the moral nature of man; the material
prosperity of a people has an important bearing on the public
liberties. Men cannot practically enjoy the rights secured to them
by law, when they are manacled and fettered by poverty; the English
and their children in America call competency, _independence_. The
Anglo-Americans have reached wealth through their political liberty;
other nations, and we, I think, are of the number, must arrive at
political franchises by the progress of national wealth. I now come to
the consideration of a credit system.
Suppose, on one side, the land-holder who has granaries bursting
with corn, his stable filled with cattle, his storehouse crowded
with barrels of whiskey and salt meat; then, the merchant with his
warehouses full of cloth, and the grocer, well supplied with tea,
coffee, and sugar; and on the other, the labourer, the mason, the
carpenter, the smith, all skilled in their trade and wanting work to
supply them with daily food. A canal or a railroad is projected; the
country has capital enough to construct it, since it contains the arms
to execute the works, and the necessaries for subsisting the labourers.
The construction of the work is indispensable in order to enable the
workman to turn his muscles to account, and gain his daily bread, and
to give the merchant a market for his goods. Now in this case, amongst
us, there is no other medium of communication between the labourer and
the holder of articles of consumption, than the engineer, a man of
science but not of capital, and the citizens of the towns which are
interested in the scheme; these last have a competence and no more,
and they have no means of raising, on their lands or their houses, the
ready money which must serve as a medium of exchange between the wares
of the merchant, the produce of the cultivator, and the labour of the
operative. Amongst us, therefore, the most useful projects remain on
paper. In this country, by the side of the engineer and the citizen,
you have one or more banks, in which all, labourers, landholders, and
traders, put confidence, often, indeed, much more than is deserved.
The bank guaranties to the cultivator and the trader payment for their
produce and merchandise, and to the labourer, his wages; for this end,
it offers the share-holder of the projected enterprise, in exchange for
his personal engagement renewable at a certain date, and often on the
pledge of the very canal or railroad shares, a paper-money, which the
labourer receives in payment of his wages, and with which he procures
the necessary supplies from the producer or the trader. Thus every
judicious and practicable project is at once carried out into execution.
In order to arrive at the same result amongst us, it would be
necessary, in the first place, that we should possess somewhat more
of that genius for business which is the characteristic of the
American, and, in the next, that the banks should be able to accept
with confidence the engagements of the share-holder of the work; the
latter requisite, could not be obtained as in the United States,
because amongst us, except in the manufacturing towns, the _bourgeois_
in general does not engage in business; he is a proprietor living on
his income and not increasing it. The American _bourgeois_, on the
contrary, is actively engaged in business, and is constantly employed
in increasing his means; and besides, the banks have more hold on his
real property, than they could have in France.
Finally, it would be necessary that the public, proprietors and
labourers, traders as well as landholders, should have full confidence
in the bills issued by the bank, which is impossible in a country
where all paper-money suggests the idea of _assignats_. Even if
the people had not that disastrous experiment before their eyes,
it would be difficult to teach them to look upon a scrap of paper,
although redeemable at sight with coin, as equivalent to the metals.
A metallic currency, has, in our notions, a superiority to any other
representative of value, which to an American or an Englishman is quite
incomprehensible; to our peasants, it is the object of a mysterious
feeling, a real worship; and, in this respect we are all of us more or
less peasants. The Americans, on the other hand, have a firm faith in
paper; and it is not a blind faith, for if we have had our _assignats_,
they have had their continental money, and they need not go far back in
their history to find a record of the failure of the banks in a body.
Their confidence is founded in reason, their courage is a matter of
reflexion Last winter, for example, it was known to the public that
certain banks in New York had on hand only five dollars in specie for
one hundred paper-dollars in circulation, and even less. In France this
would have been the signal of a general panic, and the bill-holders
would have thrown themselves in crowds upon the bank to exchange their
paper for coin. The bank, thus stormed, would have stopped payment;
fifty or seventy bills in a hundred, would have become mere rags in the
hands of the holders, and what would be more fatal, the banks, which
lean upon each other, and hold each other's notes to a large amount,
would have failed one after another, as those of the Federal District
did last April. Each bank failure would have been followed by numerous
individual failures, which would have involved other banks in their
fall, and the country would have been ruined. The Americans in this
fearful crisis, did not quail; they stood firm, like veterans under the
fire of a battery or encountering a cloud of Arabs at the foot of the
pyramids with bayonets crossed and serried files. None of the New York
banks stopped payment, and scarcely six or seven small banks failed
through the country.
Let us not deceive ourselves; it will be a long time before we shall be
in a condition, in France, to enjoy such a system of credit as exists
in the United States or England; in this respect we are yet in a state
of barbarism, from which we cannot pass to a more perfect condition of
things, except by a complete revolution in our commercial habits and
ideas, and even to a certain degree of our national manners.
I do not pretend to decide beforehand what the precise organisation of
a system of credit for France should be; but I think it may be safely
affirmed, that the system which prevails here would not do for us.
In appropriating to ourselves the improvements of the English and of
their successors in America, we must modify them in conformity with
the genius of the nation, or they will wither on our soil. As the East
is the cradle of religion, so England in our day is the mould in which
the political and commercial institutions that seem destined to rule
the world have been cast; but as the religious conceptions of the East
have had to undergo a radical change in order to gain a footing in the
West, so the political and commercial creations of our neighbours,
must undergo a transformation before they can become fixed amongst
us. Coming into the world under circumstances of a peculiar nature,
amidst a people of an original and peculiar character, born under the
unhealthy shadow of conquest and civil war, they are not suited to
be transferred bodily to another soil. They are already undergoing
modifications in America, although they are here amongst the scions
of the English stock. Among the people of the south of Europe and
among us, when they have taken their final shape, it is probable that
they will no more resemble their British type, than a Benedictine or
a Sister of Charity resembles an Indian fakir or dervish. It would be
presumptuous to attempt to pronounce at present what precise form the
institutions of credit will assume; yet it is reasonable to presume,
that to be in harmony with our character and disposition, they must
lean upon the government, combine their operation with its action,
become, in a word, public establishments, and they must be ready to
extend a large share of their benefits to the agricultural interest.
The public credit, which, in France, must be the bulwark of private
credit, still feels and will continue to feel the effect of our former
bankruptcy. It should be our aim to make the breaches of the public
faith under the monarchy and under the republic forgotten, and to
strengthen the foundations and enlarge the sphere of the national
credit, which will thus become a suitable basis for the banks, for
in France we shall not trust in the bankers, nor will the banks have
confidence in themselves, any further than they are propped up by
the government, and become in fact public establishments. Many sound
heads consider it indispensable that the system of credit, should be,
in many respects, amalgamated with the financial system of the State.
This is no rash speculation, or untried novelty. In the Southern and
Western States, which, like France, are chiefly agricultural, the
principal banks are dependent on the State governments, they are
employed in collecting the taxes, and transferring funds on account of
the State treasury. This is the case, in a greater or less degree, in
the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama, and still more so in Indiana and
Illinois.
The greatest change, which institutions of credit will have to
undergo in their introduction amongst us, will be the adaptation of
them to the wants of agriculture. We are more an agricultural than a
manufacturing people; three fourths or four fifths of our population
live by agriculture. The English are especially devoted to manufactures
and commerce; their banks are most easily accessible to the merchant,
next to the manufacturer, and but little or not at all, to the
agriculturist. The feudal traits, which landed property still retains
among them, contribute to this result. In this country, the banks have
been organised on the English model. They have become excessively
numerous in the Northern States,[DI] which are inhabited by a people
eminently possessing the manufacturing and commercial spirit. Those
which have been established in the agricultural States of the South
and West, have fallen through at different crises, of which the most
disastrous was that of 1819. In 1828, the local banks had ceased to
exist in Kentucky and Missouri; each of the States of Tennessee,
Indiana, Illinois, Mississippi, and Alabama, had but one, or had not
yet established any. At present they are created in the South and West
with something of a public character, the state either becoming the
principal share-holder or guarantying the loan for raising a capital.
Several of them have a decided tendency to connect themselves with the
agricultural interest. Louisiana has adopted the most comprehensive and
important measures in this respect.[DJ]
It is evident that the extension of credit in France would be the means
of a greater saving to the people, than any reform in the budget. The
average rate of interest on all transactions of all kinds is at least
15 or 20, perhaps, 25 per cent. Suppose that this could be reduced
only two per cent., a result which does not seem very difficult to be
obtained, it is plain, that as positive a saving would be made to the
country as could be made by a diminution of the expenses of government,
and that the former would be applicable to as many millions as the
latter would be to thousands. It is not possible to give an exact
estimate of the amount of the annual transactions in France, it must
be enormous, for every time an article of property changes hands,
there is a transaction affected by the rate of interest; now the total
annual produce of French industry is estimated at nearly 2,000 millions
dollars; and we must suppose the amount of transactions to be ten or
twelve times greater. The annual amount of commercial transactions
alone is about 4,000 millions. Admitting the average credit to be four
months, and the mass of transactions to amount to 16,000 millions, a
saving of two per cent. a year would be equal to 100 millions. Add to
this that the creation of institutions of credit would make a saving
once for all of 300 or 400 millions, by the substitution of paper for a
portion of the metallic currency. (See _Letter V._)
It would be superfluous to dwell upon the salutary influence of a
judicious system of public works on the prosperity of all classes,
and more especially of the lower classes. On this point every one
is already convinced; it would be an enterprise worthy of a great
people to undertake such a system, which should include canals, local
roads, and railroads on the great routes; which should drain our bogs
and supply water to the districts that need irrigation; which should
convert Rouen and Havre, Lille and Calais, Orleans, Rheims, and Troyes
into suburbs of Paris; should consummate the union of Belgium with
France; should make Strasburg one of the greatest _entrepôts_ in the
world; should restore life to Bordeaux, which is now pining away, by
giving it a more easy access to the central and southern departments;
should revive Nantes, which is dead, by connecting it with the
flourishing interior provinces, and particularly with Paris, the heart
of France; should bring Lyons into contact with the Rhine and the
Danube; should develop our mineral wealth, which now lies useless in
the bowels of the earth, for want of means of transportation; should
not, as is too often the case, overlook our peaceful and laborious
country population, but should deliver every farm and village from the
six months' blockade, to which they are now condemned by the mud of
every winter. This would be a grand and noble enterprise.
There is a common bond of union between the various branches of social
improvement; a good system of public works would exercise a powerful
influence on the extension of credit, and, reciprocally, a liberal
system of public and private credit, would communicate activity to
public enterprises. I go further; it is impossible that our public
works should be carried forward with vigour, without the aid of
credit. To pretend to execute them wholly by means of taxes, would be
madness. Without public and private credit, the Americans would never
have had any public works. They have entered upon the construction
of their great canals and their innumerable railroads only through
the instrumentality of the banks and their loans. In 1828, the three
cities of the Federal District, Washington, Georgetown, and Alexandria,
having together a population of 32,000 souls, with little trade, no
manufactures, or agricultural resources, for the country around is
sterile, subscribed 1,500,000 dollars towards the construction of the
great canal from the Chesapeake to the Ohio, raising the funds by a
loan in Holland. Our large towns Bordeaux, Marseilles, Rouen, Lyons,
will have canals and railroads, whenever they shall see fit to do with
moderation what Washington, Georgetown, and Alexandria have attempted
on too great a scale.
The improvement of the means of transportation often causes such a fall
in the price of articles, that the construction of a canal or road
relieves the inhabitants to an extent much exceeding the amount of
the most oppressive tax. In France, where wine is abundant, and where
it is a light drink which does not brutify a man, it is important to
bring it within the reach of the poorer classes, and to accustom them
to the daily use of it. There are still several districts in central
and southern France, in which wine is transported on the back of mules,
for a distance of 40 miles. Transportation, the same distance, by a
canal, would only be one sixth of the price of mule carriage, or would
make a saving of five cents a gallon, which is more than the excise on
the common wines; so that the construction of a canal, considered in
this light, would be a greater relief to certain consumers, than the
suppression of the excise.
In regard to legislation, we have reason to congratulate ourselves
on having a uniform system of laws, instead of a jumble of rules and
customs derived from all ages and various sources. The spirit of
Napoleon pervaded the creation of this noble work; but Napoleon was
wholly pre-occupied with Roman ideas; he wished to found an empire of
adamant on the Roman model; his counsellors were possessed with the
notion that the Roman law was pure, absolute, immutable justice. They
have, therefore, given us a code of laws, protecting various interests
rather according to the degree of importance which they possessed
eighteen hundred years ago, than that which they have acquired in
modern times. In the time of the Romans, landed property was almost
the only property; agriculture was the only branch of industry held
in respect; manufactures were merely a department of domestic labour,
and were carried on by the slaves in the house; commerce was abandoned
to foreigners and freedmen. At that time, no one dreamed of the
possibility of those huge factories on the English plan, or of that
powerful machinery which is the soul of our industry; or those immense
docks and and store-houses, which enable a man, in his closet, to
arrange and direct the most extensive operations, without touching an
article of merchandise, or even inspecting samples, merely by setting
his signature to a warrant or a receipt. The system of accounts was
then unknown; the idea of banks did not occur to the most far-sighted
intellect. Governments took little thought for the means of making
exchanges sure, easy, and speedy; the great roads opened by the prætors
and emperors, were military roads. Little care was given to economy of
time; for time has a value only in an industrious community.[DK] On the
contrary, there was every reason for endeavouring to keep property in
the great families. Landed property, with reference to which all the
laws were framed, is inconsistent with the idea of constant change. The
object of legislation was stability and permanency; the forms which it
established, were favourable to delay.
Following this example, Napoleon and his counsellors have given us a
code of laws, in which every thing is sacrificed to landed property.
The law treats the manufacturer and the merchant with suspicion; it
looks upon them as the sons of the slave and the freedman, or at
least, as persons of no consideration, commoners whom it is permitted
to treat without ceremony. On the other hand, the presumption is
always in favour of the proprietor; he is protected not because he
is a cultivator and producer, but simply and abstractly because he
is a proprietor, the owner of the soil, the successor of the Roman
patrician and the feudal lord. Thus our laws overlook the importance
of manufacturing industry, and the great destiny which awaits it; they
shackle and check it by the complicated formalities to which they
subject it, and the vexatious details with which they embarrass its
movements.
Let me not, however, be too severe on our code; I do not know any
other, which, all things considered, is more advantageous to industry.
Even the American legislation has retained the defects of the English
laws; it partakes in their vagueness and uncertainty; it is under the
almost exclusive dominion of precedents which it still borrows from
English decisions as if North America were still an English colony.
In most of the States, the undefined and conflicting pretensions of
the common law and equity jurisdiction still remain in force. In some
of the old States, as Virginia, the legislation yet bears many of the
features of the feudal system. American law, however, has the great
advantage of a simpler and less expensive process than ours or the
English, and especially of a great economy of time by a reduction of
the delays attending the English and French practice. As for the use
of the jury in civil cases, it is of doubtful expediency. I often hear
it said, that it would be better to leave them to three judicious and
irremovable judges, than to twelve citizens, who often carry their
individual prejudices, or party passions, or class jealousies into the
jury-box. With a jury, the influence of a skilful advocate often weighs
much, the merits of the cause too little. Finally, in this country,
the commercial tribunals have no compulsory jurisdiction; the ordinary
courts take cognizance of all causes, unless there is a previous
agreement between the parties to submit all differences that may arise
between them to arbiters or a committee of the chamber of commerce,
which is merely a voluntary association, and is not to be found in all
parts of the country.