Their bill cases as a rule are full of the bills drawn in the most profitable trades, and caeteris paribus and in comparison empty of those drawn in the less profitable.  If the iron trade ceases to be as profitable as usual, less iron is sold; the fewer the sales the fewer the bills; and in consequence the number of iron bills in Lombard street is diminished.  On the other hand, if in consequence of a bad harvest the corn trade becomes on a sudden profitable, immediately ‘corn bills’ are created in great numbers, and if good are discounted in Lombard Street.  Thus English capital runs as surely and instantly where it is most wanted, and where there is most to be made of it, as water runs to find its level.

This efficient and instantly-ready organisation gives us an enormous advantage in competition with less advanced countries—­less advanced, that is, in this particular respect of credit.  In a new trade English capital is instantly at the disposal of persons capable of understanding the new opportunities and of making good use of them.  In countries where there is little money to lend, and where that little is lent tardily and reluctantly, enterprising traders are long kept back, because they cannot at once borrow the capital, without which skill and knowledge are useless.  All sudden trades come to England, and in so doing often disappoint both rational probability and the predictions of philosophers.  The Suez Canal is a curious case of this.  All predicted that the canal would undo what the discovery of the passage to India round the Cape effected.  Before that all Oriental trade went to ports in the South of Europe, and was thence diffused through Europe.  That London and Liverpool should be centres of East Indian commerce is a geographical anomaly, which the Suez Canal, it was said, would rectify.  ‘The Greeks,’ said M. de Tocqueville, ’the Styrians, the Italians, the Dalmatians, and the Sicilians, are the people who will use the Canal if any use it.’  But, on the contrary, the main use of the Canal has been by the English.  None of the nations named by Tocqueville had the capital, or a tithe of it, ready to build the large screw steamers which alone can use the Canal profitably.  Ultimately these plausible predictions may or may not be right, but as yet they have been quite wrong, not because England has rich people—­there are wealthy people in all countries—­but because she possesses an unequalled fund of floating money, which will help in a moment any merchant who sees a great prospect of new profit.

And not only does this unconscious ‘organisation of capital,’ to use a continental phrase, make the English specially quick in comparison with their neighbours on the continent at seizing on novel mercantile opportunities, but it makes them likely also to retain any trade on which they have once regularly fastened.  Mr. Macculloch, following Ricardo, used to teach that all old nations had a special aptitude for trades