Quotation of the Day…

… is from page 107 of Jacob Viner, Studies in the Theory of International Trade (1937):

A constant note in the writings of the merchants [in early- and mid-18th-century Britain] was the insistence upon the usefulness to the community of trade and the dignity and social value of the trader, and in the eighteenth century it appears to have become common for others than the traders themselves to accept them at their own valuation.

Here we have more evidence for Deirdre McCloskey's thesis of the "bourgeois revaluation" as explained in her 2010 book Bourgeois Dignity.