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Nature of the Demand for Money.

The demand for ordinary goods at the existing price is for some definite quantity. If a lower price is fixed, it is because the dealer wants to draw in more buyers, in order to get some extra quantity taken off his hands. But the buyers in the money market, that is to say, the borrowers, want no stimulus to come forward. There are always enough of them ready to take loans if they can get them. It is upon the lender that the stimulus chiefly acts, causing him to be less nice in his choice of bills for discount at one time than at another. There is a certain quantity of first-class bills, at any one time, which cannot be increased by any possible reduction in the rate. If there be more money to place out than the first-class bills absorb, the broker must take second-class, and then third-class; so that by far the most important effect connected with the reduction of the rate is, that the discounts go lower and lower amongst the inferior bills, until capital is, to a very large extent, placed within reach of persons who could not otherwise obtain it. The difference between four and two per cent. is a trifle compared with the difference between getting the loan and not getting it at all. When the rate of discount is high, many borrowers are shut out altogether, to whom the fall in the rate restores a very free command of capital.

Speculators.

Amongst these is a swarm of speculators, whose precise means no one knows, who hover now about Capel Court and now about Mincing Lane; who, while times are hard, remain dormant and out of sight, like the flies, but at the first outburst of the speculative summer, reappear and fill all the air with their hum and profitless activity; profitless, that is, to the public, not to themselves. For it does happen from time to time that one or other of these spectral visitants contrives to

invest himself with the flesh and blood of actual parish-ratepaying existence, and neat suburban villas may be seen, which have been thus conjured out of the general stock into the hands of their possessors, without capital or industry, or warehouse or character, solely through a dexterous manipulation of the money power placed for a time at their disposal by others. The cause of success is, of course, a lucky hit, a fortunate anticipation of one or more of those great fluctuations in prices which often form the basis of transactions apparently commercial, but in reality not different in principle from the operations of the hazard table.

Moral Habits of Commerce.

Commerce and gambling run into each other by shades so gradual that it is hard to say where one ends and the other begins. Nevertheless, the distinction is as real as between black and white, which may join by a thousand intermediate shades, and the moral habits which they engender are as opposite as light and darkness. Mercantile morals are indeed not the highest, but they are high, and perhaps mark as high a point as has yet been attained by any wide-spread class of men. Untiring industry from youth up; resolute scorn of delights where they interfere with laborious days; faithful, exact performance of every business duty, great or minute; and a sensibility of mercantile honour, which, in the beautiful words of Burke, feels a stain like a wound-all these belong to the best types of the class, especially as it exists in England. But with these is too apt to combine a hardness towards claims which intervene between those of strict right and those of absolute mercy. The merchant is princely in his charities, and towards the men of his own class, when unfortunate, as in cases of bankruptcy without fault, eminently generous and forbearing; but while he is in the hot strife of business, his adversaries are his adversaries, and not his brother men. The rules of the

warfare are, indeed, to be strictly observed, as amongst the old knights; but within those limits, by every fair weapon, sword, spear, and battle-axe, to cut, pierce, and crush, is the recognised law. When a combatant is down and writhing, the victor may stoop to look into his wounds; but in this again one is reminded of the constancy with which the spirit of the Old repeats itself in the forms of the New. The mailed warriors of the middle ages were thoughtful for their own caste, but took little account of the lives or sufferings of the peasantry. Edward the Black Prince, the very flower of ancient knighthood, suffered not only men, but women and children, to be massacred during the reconquest of Guienne. The modern capitalist can often be generous to one of his own caste in a court of bankruptcy, and yet when he returns to his commercial battle, where inferiors are arrayed against him, he resents it as an impertinence to be asked to bestow a thought on the women and the children. "Business is business," he loves to sayCharity is charity." Yet the maxim is false. God made no such distribution of the duties of life1.

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Morals of Gambling and Speculation.

Commerce, then, has its vices, but gambling scarcely has its virtues. That one poor solitary point of honour, the resolution to pay the forfeit, at whatever cost-that last restraining law, which, when broken, lets the gambler fall into the abyss of self

A dear personal friend, engaged for several years in the East India trade, over whose premature grave I stood ten years ago with other friends now also gone, possessed all the virtues in the above sketch without one of its harsher lineaments. Yet his fate was a lesson. Warm beyond most men in his domestic affections, which were centred in a happy home, it yet happened that the devouring anxiety of mind connected with a period of commercial pressure gradually absorbed the whole current of thought and feeling. Under the incessant strain his health gave way, and he bore it. But he had ultimately to go through a court of bankruptcy, and though he did it with untarnished honour, he did not long survive the shock. A breath had passed over the pure and polished shield, and it never again could be raised with the same pride as before.

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contempt is the redeeming virtue of the calling, but its whole spirit is immoral.

Of course, like other deflections from the highest moral standard, in those cases in which it has long established forms, nature, if we may so speak, confines the evil to the smallest compass. Her sweet vegetation clusters round, and perhaps hides, the deformity which she cannot remove. The untruth of the advocate, indefensible in itself, is found to coexist with perfect veracity in all other relations of life; and for other virtues, where are they to be found in more vigour and abundance than amongst practitioners of the law? In the long and illustrious line of English judges, there is probably not one who has not repeatedly lent his learning or his eloquence to what he must have known to be injustice. Yet he would be a bold moralist who would venture to cast a stone at a Hale or a Denman. So of the turf. An English horse-race is better than a Spanish bull-fight, much better than those intense excitements of the Roman amphitheatre, whose overpowering charm was felt even by St. Augustine. It is inferior, but inferior only, to the Olympic games. Yet, whatever Mr. Disraeli may think, the turf is not the training place for an English statesman. Lord George Bentinck was very much the worse for his gambling. It is the curse of the English nobles, to have no readier outlet for their energies. Here again, however, the omnipotent influence of custom makes itself felt. Innumerable things may combine in England with betting,-the national and manly passion for noble horses-the ambition for a recognised and real distinction, "the blue riband of the turf"-and that contagious sympathy with a great common interest, which none escape-all neutralizing the influence of the evil upon the general life.

But extract the essential principle from these customary forms -let the greedy appetite for gain without toil or return, have some new field of exercise, in which, custom providing no vesture, it must work in its naked deformity, and then its result can be nothing but demoralization; the commencement of a cancerous

process, which goes on in widening circles, eating away all that is sound in the social life. This happens to a great extent in all speculative periods, and each leaves behind a corrupt deposit which the next enlarges.

Line between Commerce and Gambling.

But all commerce is speculation. Where is the line to be drawn? The main principle is clear, though its detailed application is difficult. All that can be done is to show the point of divergence, and then leave each man to choose his own road at his peril.

Whatever aids the distribution of goods is commerce. Any mode of operating upon prices that cannot have that tendency is gambling. But the simple holding over of stocks, such as grain, so far from being gambling, is often, in spite of the popular prejudice, one of the best services that commerce renders to society-the equable sharing out of short stores amongst a shipwrecked crew. All sorts of time bargains therefore, it need scarcely be said, whether of securities, railway shares, or produce, where no realities pass or are intended to pass, are as purely gambling as rouge et noir and roulette. As for rigging the market,” and similiar expedients, frequent enough in times of mania, they are not gambling, but fraud; and if the law could grasp delicately enough to seize the perpetrators, the proper place for them is the bar of the Old Bailey.

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Whatever immediately or remotely brings about the condition in which these things are done-in which being done first by the shameless, they are done afterwards by others less degraded, until class after class is sucked into the vortex-is to be dreaded and guarded against as one of the greatest of national calamities.

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