twenty and thirty pounds at a time, the company discounting a proportionable
part of the interest of the great sum, from the day on which each of those
small sums is paid in, till the whole be in this manner repaid. All
merchants, therefore, and almost all men of business, find it convenient to
keep such cash accounts with them, and are thereby interested to promote the
trade of those companies, by readily receiving their notes in all payments,
and by encouraging all those with whom they have any influence to do the
same. The banks, when their customers apply to them for money, generally
advance it to them in their own promissory notes. These the merchants pay
away to the manufacturers for goods, the manufacturers to the farmers for
materials and provisions, the farmers to their landlords for rent; the
landlords repay them to the merchants for the conveniencies and luxuries
with which they supply them, and the merchants again return them to the
banks, in order to balance their cash accounts, or to replace what they my
have borrowed of them ; and thus almost the whole money business of the
country is transacted by means of them. Hence the great trade of those
companies.

By means of those cash accounts, every merchant can, without imprudence,
carry on a greater trade than he otherwise could do. If there are two
merchants, one in London and the other in Edinburgh, who employ equal stocks
in the same branch of trade, the Edinburgh merchant can, without imprudence,
carry on a greater trade, and give employment to a greater number of people,
than the London merchant. The London merchant must always keep by him a
considerable sum of money, either in his own coffers, or in those of his
banker, who gives him no interest for it, in order to answer the demands
continually coming upon him for payment of the goods which he purchases upon
credit. Let the ordinary amount of this sum be supposed five hundred pounds
; the value of the goods in his warehouse must always be less, by five
hundred pounds, than it would have been, had he not been obliged to keep