United States or Bahamas ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
At present we have but few men on the turf; we should then have few men not on Exchange, especially if we adopt your law, and can contrive to be traders without risk of becoming bankrupts. Napoleon I. called us a shopkeeping nation. Napoleon III. has taught France to excel us in everything, and certainly he has made Paris a shopkeeping city."
Let us suppose, for example, that in the particular town where he lived, ten per cent. was the ordinary profit both of manufacturing and shopkeeping stock; he must in this case have charged upon every piece of his own goods, which he sold in his shop, a profit of twenty per cent.
I comforted myself by saying that of course the shop was only a temporary expedient; I should get out of it; I should find another way of making money; but, you see, I'm as far from that as ever; and if I decide to go on shopkeeping don't I condemn myself to solitude?" "It is a difficulty," said Bertha, in the tone of one who lightly ponders an abstract question.
Only the rich and exceeding well-to-do people keep servants, others content themselves with a charwoman who comes in for two hours a day, and is paid ten or twelve francs a month, many ladies, by birth and education, living on small means, doing all the lighter household work, marketing, &c., themselves, whilst the small shopkeeping class, who with us must invariably have a wretched drudge, called a maid-of-all-work, never dream of getting anyone to cook or clean for them.
How ordinary is it to see a tradesman go off the stage, even but from mere shopkeeping, with from ten to forty thousand pounds' estate, to divide among his family! when, on the contrary, take the gentry in England from one end to the other, except a few here and there, what with excessive high living, which is of late grown so much into a disease, and the other ordinary circumstances of families, we find few families of the lower gentry, that is to say, from six or seven hundred a-year downwards, but they are in debt and in necessitous circumstances, and a great many of greater estates also.
That is a sad and sorrowful example, but I am afraid it will not be a solitary one for a long time. Then you have the shopkeeping class descending to the rank of the operatives. It must be so. Withdraw the custom of 7,000,000 pounds per annum, which has ceased to be paid in wages, from the shopkeepers, and the consequence must present itself to any rational mind.
It is wrong and absurd to have a terror of a shop." "I cannot help feeling a great repugnance to shopkeeping." "Then would you rather be a governess, supposing you were capable?" "Oh, Jane, that is such a hard life. I should be separated from you; and then one is worried by the children, and snubbed by the parents, sneered at by servants, and ignored by visitors." "Then dressmaking?
While still a boy in his teens, and put prematurely to uncongenial attempts at shopkeeping and farmkeeping, he at any rate made the great discovery that in books and in the gathering of knowledge from books could be found solace and entertainment; in short, he then acquired a taste for reading. No one pretends that Patrick Henry ever became a bookish person.
The emancipation of the shopkeeping and middle classes makes Sunday almost as tiresome in Paris as it is deadly in London. So the Baroness invited the famous Desplein to dinner, to consult him in spite of the sick man, for Nucingen persisted in asserting that he was perfectly well.
The lower portions of old premises have often been so enlarged and modernized that they give no sign of the real date of the buildings. In Bull Street, for instance, there are narrow old style windows that are very suggestive of a bygone day. But these are becoming few and far between, and will doubtless soon be seen no more. Old-fashioned shops naturally suggest new and old-style shopkeeping.
Word Of The Day