be 5 per cent., he will have to pay 2,000 L. a year; and if, like
the old trader, he make 5,000 L. a year, he will still, after paying
his interest, obtain 3,000 L. a year, or 30 per cent, on his own
10,000 L. As most merchants are content with much less than 30 per
cent, he will be able, if he wishes, to forego some of that profit,
lower the price of the commodity, and drive the old-fashioned
trader--the man who trades on his own capital--out of the market. In
modem English business, owing to the certainty of obtaining loans on
discount of bills or otherwise at a moderate rate of interest, there
is a steady bounty on trading with borrowed capital, and a constant
discouragement to confine yourself solely or mainly to your own
capital.

This increasingly democratic structure of English commerce is very
unpopular in many quarters, and its effects are no doubt exceedingly
mixed. On the one hand, it prevents the long duration of great
families of merchant princes, such as those of Venice and Genoa, who
inherited nice cultivation as well as great wealth, and who, to some
extent, combined the tastes of an aristocracy with the insight and
verve of men of business. These are pushed out, so to say, by the
dirty crowd of little men. After a generation or two they retire
into idle luxury. Upon their immense capital they can only obtain
low profits, and these they do not think enough to compensate them
for the rough companions and rude manners they must meet in
business. This constant levelling of our commercial houses is, too,
unfavourable to commercial morality. Great firms, with a reputation
which they have received from the past, and which they wish to
transmit to the future, cannot be guilty of small frauds. They live
by a continuity of trade, which detected fraud would spoil. When we
scrutinise the reason of the impaired reputation of English goods,