Many stock brokers transact such business upon a great scale.  They lend large sums on foreign bonds or railway shares or other such securities, and borrow those sums from bankers, depositing the securities with the bankers, and generally, though not always, giving their guarantee.  But by far the greatest of these intermediate dealers are the bill-brokers.  Mercantile bills are an exceedingly difficult kind of security to understand.  The relative credit of different merchants is a great ‘tradition’; it is a large mass of most valuable knowledge which has never been described in books and is probably incapable of being so described.  The subject matter of it, too, is shifting and changing daily; an accurate representation of the trustworthiness of houses at the beginning of a year might easily be a most fatal representation at the end of it.  In all years there are great changes; some houses rise a good deal and some fall.  And in some particular years the changes are immense; in years like 1871 many active men make so much money that at the end of the year they are worthy of altogether greater credit than anyone would have dreamed of giving to them at the beginning.  On the other hand, in years like 1866 a contagious ruin destroys the trustworthiness of very many firms and persons, and often, especially, of many who stood highest immediately before.  Such years alter altogether an important part of the mercantile world:  the final question of bill-brokers, ’which bills will be paid and which will not? which bills are second-rate and which first-rate?’ would be answered very differently at the beginning of the year and at the end.  No one can be a good bill-broker who has not learnt the great mercantile tradition of what is called ‘the standing of parties’ and who does not watch personally and incessantly the inevitable changes which from hour to hour impair the truth of that tradition.  The credit’ of a personthat is, the reliance which may be placed on his pecuniary fidelityis a different thing from his property.  No doubt, other things being equal, a rich man is more likely to pay than a poor man.  But on the other hand, there are many men not of much wealth who are trusted in the market, ‘as a matter of business,’ for sums much exceeding the wealth of those who are many times richer.  A firm or a person who have been long known to ’meet their engagements,’ inspire a degree of confidence not dependent on the quantity of his or their property.  Persons who buy to sell again soon are often liable for amounts altogether much greater than their own capital; and the power of obtaining those sums depends upon their ‘respectability,’ their ‘standing,’ and their ‘credit,’ as the technical terms express it, and more simply upon the opinion which those who deal with them have formed of them.  The principal mode in which money is raised by traders is by ‘bills of exchange;’ the estimated certainty of their paying those bills on the day they fall due is the measure of their credit; and those