Page:Lombard Street (1917).djvu/40

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12
LOMBARD STREET

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 profitable trades, and cœteris paribus and in comparison empty of those drawn in the less profitable. If the iron trade ceases to be as profitable as usual, less iron is sold; the fewer the sales the fewer the bills; and in consequence the number of iron bills in Lombard Street is diminished. On the other hand, if in consequence of a bad harvest the corn trade becomes on a sudden profitable, immediately "corn bills" are created in great numbers, and if good are discounted in Lombard Street. Thus English capital runs as surely and