I

208 THE NATUliK AND CAUSES OE

the country could absorb and employ, returned upon them,in order to be exchanged for gold and silver, as fast as theyissued it; and for the payment of which they were themselvescontinually obliged to borrow money. On the contrary, thewhole expense of this borrowing, of employing agents to lookout for people who had money to lend, of negociating withthose people, and of drawing the proper bond or assignmentmust have fallen upon them, and have been so much clearloss upon the balance of their accounts. The project of re-plenishing their coffers in this manner may be compared tothat of a man who had a water-pond from which a streamwas continually running out, and into which no stream wascontinually running, but who proposed to keep it alwaysequally full by employing a number of people to go conti-nually with buckets to a well at some miles distance, in orderto bring water to replenish it.

But though this operation had proved, not only practicable,but profitable to the bank as a mercantile company ; yet thecountry could have derived no benefit from it; but, on thecontrary, must have suffered a very considerable loss by it.This operation could not augment in the smallest degree thequantity of money to be lent. It could only have erectedtliis bank into a sort of general loan office for the wholecountry. Those who wanted to borrow, must have appliedto this bank, instead of applying to the private persons whohad lent it their money. But a bank which lends money,perhaps, to five hundred different people, the greater part ofwhom its directors can know very little about, is not likelyto be more judicious in the choice of its debtors, than a pri-vate person who lends out his money among a few peoplewhom he knows, and in whose sober and frugal conduct hethinks he has good reason to confide. The debtors of sucha bank as that whose conduct I have been giving some ac-count of, were likely, the greater part of them, to be chi-merical projectors, the drawers and re-drawers of circulatingbills of exchange, who would employ the money in extrava-gant undertakings, which, with all the assistance that couldbe given them, they would probably never be able to com-plete, and which, if they should be completed, would neverrepay the expense which they had really cost, would neverafford a fund capable of maintaining a quantity of labourequal to that which had been employed about them. Thesober and frugal debtors of private persons, on the contrary,