'The Greeks,' said M.de Tocqueville, 'the Styrians, the Italians, the Dalmatians, and the Sicilians, are the people who will use the Canal if any use it.' But, on the contrary, the main use of the Canal has been by the English.

None of the nations named by Tocqueville had the capital, or a tithe of it, ready to build the large screw steamers which alone can use the Canal profitably.

Ultimately these plausible predictions may or may not be right, but as yet they have been quite wrong, not because England has rich people--there are wealthy people in all countries--but because she possesses an unequalled fund of floating money, which will help in a moment any merchant who sees a great prospect of new profit.
And not only does this unconscious 'organisation of capital,' to use a continental phrase, make the English specially quick in comparison with their neighbours on the continent at seizing on novel mercantile opportunities, but it makes them likely also to retain any trade on which they have once regularly fastened.

Mr.
Macculloch, following Ricardo, used to teach that all old nations had a special aptitude for trades in which much capital is required.
The interest of capital having been reduced in such countries, he argued, by the necessity of continually resorting to inferior soils, they can undersell countries where profit is high in all trades needing great capital.

And in this theory there is doubtless much truth, though it can only be applied in practice after a number of limitations and with a number of deductions of which the older school of political economists did not take enough notice.