"Let your science be human": David Hume and the honourable merchant

Hume directed his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) to a wider audience, including the merchant class that he credited with enhancing the freedom, peace, and prosperity of his age. Hume's text offers a vade mecum for the improvement of the merchant's character, a catalogue of virtues that would bolster the fulfilment of contracts and diminish generational decline. In conjunction with his Political Discourses (1752), Hume's Enquiry promotes the image of the honourable merchant, in the tradition set by Thomas Mun, as a means to safeguard modern commerce.