to represent it; and the example of these great institutions is copied by the smaller ones. Life-insurance companies abound, and the capitals are said to be large, but "nine-tenths" of them are declared to be "in a state of ruinous insolvency;"[159] and it is now discovered the true mode of conducting that business is to have no capital whatsoever. The trade of England is to a great extent based on the property of foreigners, in the form of wool, silk, cotton, tobacco, sugar, and other commodities, sent there for sale, and these furnish much of the capital of her merchants. While holding this vast amount of foreign capital, they supply iron and cloth, for which they take the bonds of the people of other nations; and whenever the amount of these bonds becomes too large, there comes a pressure in the money market, and the prices of all foreign commodities are forced down, to the ruin of their distant owners. To the absence of real capital [160] it is due that revulsions are so frequent, and so destructive to all countries intimately connected with her; and it is a necessary consequence of the vast extent of trading on borrowed capital that the losses by bankruptcy are so astonishingly great. From 1839 to 1843, a period of profound peace, eighty-two private bankers became bankrupt; of whom forty-six paid _no dividends_, twelve paid under twenty-five per cent., twelve under fifty per cent., three under seventy-five per cent., and two under one hundred per cent.; leaving seven unascertained at the date of the report from which this statement is derived. The last revulsion brought to light the fact that many of the oldest and most respectable houses in London had been for years trading entirely on credit, and without even a shilling of capital; and in Liverpool the destruction was so universal that it was difficult to discover more than half a dozen houses to whom a cargo could be confided. Revulsions are a necessary consequence of such a state of things, and at each and every one of them the small manufacturer and the small trader or land-owner are more and more swept away, while centralization steadily increases--and centralization is adverse to the growth of wealth and civilization. The whole fabric tends steadily more and more to take the form of an inverted pyramid, that may be thus represented:-- Ships and mills, L a n d, Labour. In confirmation of this view we have the following facts given in a speech of Mr. George Wilson, at a _réunion_ in Manchester, a few weeks since:--