Page:Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.djvu/83

Rh, of course, and that's the only coat-of-arms an American merchant has any business with. It's penetrated to every quarter of the globe in the last twenty years, and every soldier in the world has carried it—in his knapsack.

I take just as much pride in it as the fellow who inherits his and can't find any place to put it, except on his carriage door and his letter-head—and it's a heap more profitable. It's got so now that every jobber in the trade knows that it stands for good quality, and that's all any Englishman's coat-of-arms can stand for. Of course, an American's can't stand for anything much—generally it's the burned-in-the skin brand of a snob.

After the way some of the descendants of the old New York Dutchmen with the hoe and the English general storekeepers have turned out, I sometimes feel a little uneasy about what my great-grandchildren may