themselves managers, they discharge the task of ‘superintending labour’ as well. Bagehot held that the capitalists of a commercial country do—not merely the saving, and the work of foremen in superintending labour, but all the difficult intellectual work of commerce besides, and are so little appreciated as they are, chiefly because they are a dumb class who are seldom equal to explaining to others the complex processes by which they estimate the wants of the community, and conceive how best to supply them. He maintained that capitalists are the great generals of commerce, that they plan its whole strategy, determine its tactics, direct its commissariat, and incur the danger of great defeats, as well as earn, if they do not always gain, the credit of great victories. Here again is a new illustration of the light which Bagehot’s keen insight into men, taken in connection with his own intimate understanding of the commercial field, brought into his economic studies. He brought life into these dry subjects from almost every side; for instance, in writing to the _Spectator_, many years ago, about the cliff scenery of Cornwall, and especially about the petty harbour of Boscastle, with its fierce sea and its two breakwaters—which leave a mere ‘Temple Bar’ for the ships to get in at—a harbour of which he says that ‘the principal harbour of Liliput probably had just this look,’—he goes back in imagination at once to the condition of the country at the time when a great number of such petty harbours as these were essential to such trade as there was, and shows that at that time the Liverpool and London docks not only could not have been built for want of money, but would have been of no use if they had been built, since the auxiliary facilities which alone make such emporia useful did not exist. ‘Our old gentry built on their own estates as they could, and if their estates were near some wretched little haven, they were much pleased. The sea was the railway of those days. It brought, as it did to Ellangowan, in Dirk Hatteraick’s time, brandy for the men and pinners for the women, to the loneliest of coast castles.’ It was by such vivid illustrations as this of the conditions of a very different commercial life from our own, that Bagehot lit up the ‘dismal science,’ till in his hands it became both picturesque and amusing.