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 in which much capital is required.
The interest of capital having been reduced in such countries, he
argued, by the necessity of continually resorting to inferior soils,
they can undersell countries where profit is high in all trades
needing great capital. And in this theory there is doubtless much
truth, though it can only be applied in practice after a number of
limitations and with a number of deductions of which the older
school of political economists did not take enough notice. But the
same principle plainly and practically applies to England, in
consequence of her habitual use of borrowed capital. As has been
explained, a new man, with a small capital of his own and a large
borrowed capital, can undersell a rich man who depends on his own
capital only. The rich man wants the full rate of mercantile profit
on the whole of the capital employed in his trade, but the poor man