"I like Cunard and hope you will call on him. He is the most liberal as well as the most extensively engaged in business of all our merchants ... he is, I think gentlemanly; he certainly is mild and pleasant in his manners, of an apparently equal temper and possesses a gentle and not unharmonious voice. In short, I look on him as a very good kind of man."44

His education prescribed by his father, the early training he had in the lumberyard office at Halifax, his three year apprenticeship at the offices of an international shipping firm located at Boston: all of this, combined with his natural talents, gave Samuel Cunard a great advantage to any enterprise, operation, or undertaking which he undertook. One of his great traits was his determination: Cunard showed this trait in all things he pursued. Another of Cunard's enduring qualities "was never to adopt new ideas until they had been thoroughly tested by someone else." As Langley wrote, "His method was straightforward and simple -- observation and careful assessment followed by action."

Students would learn much by a study of the life and works of Samuel Cunard.

"To use means to ends; to set causes in motion; to wield the machine of society; to subject the wills of others to your own; to manage abler men than yourself by means of that which is stronger in them than their wisdom, viz. their weakness and their folly; to calculate the resistance of ignorance and prejudice to your designs, and by obviating, to turn them to account; to foresee a long, obscure, and complicated train of events, of chances and openings of success; to unwind the web of others' policy and weave your own out of it; to judge of the effects of things, not in the abstract, but with reference to all their bearings, ramifications, and impediments; to understand character thoroughly; to see latent talent or lurking treachery; to know mankind for what they are, and use them as they deserve; to have a purpose steadily in view, and to effect it after removing every obstacle; to master others and be true to yourself, asks power and knowledge, both nerves and brain. ... Such is the sort of talent that may be shown and that has been possessed by the great leaders on the stage of the world."45