In a new trade English capital is instantly at the disposal of persons capable of understanding the new opportunities and of making good use of them.
In countries where there is little money to lend, and where that little is lent tardily and reluctantly, enterprising traders are long kept back, because they cannot at once borrow the capital, without which skill and knowledge are useless.

All sudden trades come to England, and in so doing often disappoint both rational probability and the predictions of philosophers.

The Suez Canal is a curious case of this.

All predicted that the canal would undo what the discovery of the passage to India round the Cape effected.
Before that all Oriental trade went to ports in the South of Europe, and was thence diffused through Europe.

That London and Liverpool should be centres of East Indian commerce is a geographical anomaly, which the Suez Canal, it was said, would rectify.