But, gentlemen, do you believe that merchants' books are good in practice?
It does appear to me, if there is anything which can have a practical authority, when the object is to prove profit and loss, that this must be commercial accounts.

We cannot suppose that all the merchants of the world, for centuries back, should have so little understood their own affairs, as to have kept their books in such a manner as to represent gains as losses, and losses as gains.

Truly it would be easier to believe that our legislators are bad political economists.

A merchant, one of my friends, having had two business transactions, with very different results, I have been curious to compare on this subject the accounts of the counter with those of the custom-house, interpreted by our legislators.
Mr.T dispatched from New Orleans a vessel freighted for France with cotton valued at $200,000.

Such was the amount entered at the custom-house.