’Does the party who furnishes the money give you any kind of compensation?—­None at all.

’Does he not consider you as his agent, and in some degree responsible for the safety of the bills which you give him?—­Not at all.

’Does he not prefer you on the score of his judging that you will give him good intelligence upon that subject?—­Yes, he relies upon us.

’Do you then exercise a discretion as to the probable safety of the bills?—­Yes; if a bill comes to us which we conceive not to be safe, we return it.

’Do you not then conceive yourselves to depend in a great measure for the quantity of business which you can perform on the favour of the party lending the money?—­Yes, very much so.  If we manage our business well, we retain our friends; if we do not, we lose them.’

It was natural enough that the owners of the money should not pay, though the owner of the bill did, for in almost all ages the borrower has been a seeker more or less anxious; he has always been ready to pay for those who will find him the money he is in search of.  But the possessor of money has rarely been willing to pay anything; he has usually and rightly believed that the borrower would discover him soon.

Notwithstanding other changes, the distribution of the customers of the bill-brokers in different parts of the country still remains much as Mr. Richardson described it sixty years ago.  For the most part, agricultural counties do not employ as much money as they save; manufacturing counties, on the other hand, can employ much more than they save; and therefore the money of Norfolk or of Somersetshire is deposited with the London bill-brokers, who use it to discount the bills of Lancashire and Yorkshire.

The old practice of bill-broking, which Mr. Richardson describes, also still exists.  There are many brokers to be seen about Lombard Street with bills which they wish to discount but which they do not guarantee.  They have sometimes discounted these bills with their own capital, and if they can re-discount them at a slightly lower rate they gain a difference which at first seems but trifling, but with which they are quite content, because this system of lending first and borrowing again immediately enables them to turn their capital very frequently, and on a few thousand pounds of capital to discount hundreds of thousands of bills; as the transactions are so many, they can be content with a smaller profit on each.  In other cases, these nonguaranteeing brokers are only agents who are seeking money for bills which they have undertaken to get discounted.  But in either case, as far as the banker or other ultimate capitalist is concerned, the transaction is essentially that which Mr. Richardson describes.  The loan by such banker is a rediscount of the bill; that banker cannot obtain repayment of that loan, except by the payment of the bill at maturity.  He has no claim upon the agent who brought him the bill.  Billbroking, in this which we may call its archaic form, is simply one of the modes in which bankers obtain bills which are acceptable to them and which they rediscount.  No reference is made in it to the credit of the bill-broker; the bills being discounted ‘without recourse’ to him are as good if taken from a pauper as if taken from a millionaire.  The lender exercises his own judgment on the goodness of the bill.