Volume 1

An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations / by Adam Smith.

  • Smith, Adam, 1723-1790.
Date:
1796
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations / by Adam Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    $ But though this operation had proved, not only praiflicable, but profitable to the bank as a mercantile company; yet the country could have derived no benefit from it; but, on the con- trary, mufi; have fuffered a very confiderable lofs by it. This operation could not augment in the fmallefl: degree the quantity of money to be lent. It could only have erected this bank into a fort of general loan office for the whole country. Thofe who wanted to borrow, muft have applied to this bank, inftead of applying to the private perfons who had lent it their money. But a bank which lends money, perhaps, to five hundred different people, the greater part of whom its directors can know very little about, is not likely to be more judicious in the choice of its debtors, than a private perfon who lends out his money among a few people whom he knows, and in whofe fober and frugal conduct he thinks he has good reafon to confide. The debtors of fuch a bank as that whofe condu61: I have been eiving fome account of, were likely, the greater part of them, to be chimerical projeftors, the drawers and re-drawers of circulating bills of exchange, who would employ the money in extravagant undertakings, which, with all the affiftance that could be given them, they would probably never be able to complete, and which, if they fhould be completed, would never repay the expence which they had really coft, would never afford a fund capable of maintaining a quantity of labour equal to that which had been employed about them. The fober and frugal debtors of pri- vate