, and their utility for
adorning temples and so propitiating divine favour, ousted all other
commodities which had been used for money; and they are now to a great
extent ousted by pieces of paper, which still, however, represent claims
to so much gold.

The discovery of a circulating medium enormously facilitated the
progress of commerce, and it was not long before a class of people grew
up who specialized in this particular form of business and became
financiers and moneylenders. Bankers and financiers were known in Rome
and Athens, and we know that some machinery existed by which the
monetary claims of one country on another could be settled by something
that fulfilled the functions of the modern bill of exchange. The actual
provision of metallic currency has from the earliest times been almost
entirely under the control of the government which took into its own
hands, as an essential part of the police protection which it gives to
the people, the coining of currency, stamping the coin in such a way
that anybody who took one might know that he was getting a certain
weight of a precious metal. But the money-dealing business very soon
developed the machinery of credit by which anybody who had an enterprise
or a venture out of which he expected to make an attractive profit
could, if he had sufficient property to pledge, provide himself with the
means to finance it between the day that he started on his operations
and the day when he brought home his profits: and this business also
became international, though not, perhaps, as rapidly as commerce had
overstepped the boundaries between one people and another.

In the _Merchant of Venice_ we find Antonio trading with all the
countries of the then known world,

From Tripolis, from Mexico, and England,
From Lisbon, Barbary, and India,

but we do not find that Shylock was lending money on at all the same
international scale. When communication was slow, difficult, and
untrustworthy, money-lending at a distance was made very risky, because
it was impossible for the lender to keep the watchful eye on the
borrower's operations and credit that is required if he is to feel
comfortable in his venture. For a Lombard Street banker to lend money to
a merchant in Cheapside payable at a year hence was, until comparatively
lately, a much safer enterprise than to lend it to a merchant in Paris,
because the local borrower was always under the lender's observation. If
he were o