"discounts." These men want business at once, and they produce an inferior article to get it. They rely on cheapness, and rely successfully.
But these defects and others in the democratic structure of commerce are compensated by one great excellence. No country of great hereditary trade, no European country at least, was ever so little "sleepy," to use the only fit word, as England; no other was ever so prompt at once to seize new advantages. A country dependent mainly on great "merchant princes" will never be so prompt; their commerce 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
