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.
Their bill cases as a rule are full of the bills drawn in the most