perpetually slips more and more into a commerce of routine.  A man of large wealth, however intelligent, always thinks, more or less ’I have a great income, and I want to keep it.  If things go on as they are I shall certainly keep it; but if they change I may not keep it.’  Consequently he considers every change of circumstance a ‘bore,’ and thinks of such changes as little as he can.  But a new man, who has his way to make in the world, knows that such changes are his opportunities; he is always on the look-out for them, and always heeds them when he finds them.  The rough and vulgar structure of English commerce is the secret of its life; for it contains ’the propensity to variation,’ which, in the social as in the animal kingdom, is the principle of progress.

In this constant and chronic borrowing, Lombard Street is the great go-between.  It is a sort of standing broker between quiet saving districts of the country and the active employing districts.  Why particular trades settled in particular places it is often difficult to say; but one thing is certain, that when a trade has settled in any one spot, it is very difficult for another to oust it—­impossible unless the second place possesses some very great intrinsic advantage.  Commerce is curiously conservative in its homes, unless it is imperiously obliged to migrate.  Partly from this cause, and partly from others, there are whole districts in England which cannot and do not employ their own money.  No purely agricultural county does so.  The savings of a county with good land but no manufactures and no trade much exceed what can be safely lent in the county.  These savings are first lodged in the local banks, are by them sent to London, and are deposited with London bankers, or with the bill brokers.  In either case the result is the same.  The money thus sent up from the accumulating districts is employed in discounting the bills of the industrial districts.  Deposits are made with the bankers and bill brokers in Lombard Street by the bankers of such counties as Somersetshire and Hampshire, and those bill brokers and bankers employ them in the discount of bills from Yorkshire and Lancashire.  Lombard Street is thus a perpetual agent between the two great divisions of England, between the rapidly-growing districts, where almost any amount of money can be well and easily employed, and the stationary and the declining districts, where there is more money than can be used.

This organisation is so useful because it is so easily adjusted.  Political economists say that capital sets towards the most profitable trades, and that it rapidly leaves the less profitable and non-paying trades.  But in ordinary countries this is a slow process, and some persons who want to have ocular demonstration of abstract truths have been inclined to doubt it because they could not see it.  In England, however, the process would be visible enough if you could only see the books of the bill brokers and the bankers.