to take care
of their liabilities. But that they have been a tremendous--an
incalculable--factor in the general advancement of the country cannot be
questioned.

The difference between the parts played by the banks in the two
countries rests of course on two fundamental differences in the
condition of the countries themselves. The first of these is the fact
that while England is a country of accumulated wealth and large fortunes
which need safeguarding, America has until recently been a country of
small realised wealth but immense natural resources which needed
developing. The policy of the banks has been shaped to meet the demands
of the situation.

In the second place (and too much stress cannot be laid upon this in any
comparison of the business-life of the two peoples) the American is
always trading on a rising market. This is true of the individual and
true of the nation. Temporary fluctuations there are of course, but
after every setback the country has only gone ahead faster than before.
The man with faith in the future, provided only that he looked far
enough ahead to be protected against temporary times of depression, has
always won. Just as the railway companies push their lines out into the
wilderness, confident of the population that will follow, and are never
disappointed, so in all other lines the man who is always in advance,
who does not wait for the demand to be there before he enlarges his
plant to meet it, but who sees it coming and is ready for it when it
comes--the man who has always acted in the belief that the future will
be bigger than the present,--that man has never failed to reap his
reward. Of course the necessary danger in such a condition is that of
over-speculation. But nearly every man who amasses wealth or wins large
commercial success in the United States habitually takes risks which
would be folly in England. They are not folly in him, because the
universal growth of the country, dragging with it and buoying up all
industries and all values, as it goes, is on his side. It is inevitable
that there should result a national temperament more buoyant, more
enterprising, more alert.

* * * * *

What is important, too, is that whereas in England the field is already
more or less full and was handed down to the present generation well
occupied, so that new industries can, as it were, only be erected on the
ruins of old, and a site has to be cleared of one fa