Confidence, I have said, is, in the production of economic wealth, the vitalizing element. In economics it plays the part that faith plays in religion. Confidence and credit have like derivations, like connotations. Confidence is a confiding in, credit a believing in. But, we must ask, a confiding or believing in what? Confidence, the spirit of economic prosperity, is distinct from what is called Lombard Street credit. Confidence is vastly more potent than Lombard Street credit. If confidence be dead Lombard Street credit cannot of itself revive it. But confidence can revive Lombard Street credit. When the nation is prostrate and languid confidence alone can revivify it. It is the economic tonic. In the money article it would excite derision if we wrote: “In Lombard Street to-day confidence was again in superabundant supply, and lenders were offering it on nominal terms. Confidence over the night could be obtained in liberal quantity from 1½ per cent. downwards, and for a week at no more than 1¾ per cent. In fact, balances of confidence were unlendable. Owing to the cheapness of confidence the discount market was again exceedingly weak, and rates continued to fall.” Yet, it is said, we have built up in this country a vast superstructure of confidence, or belief, based on a slight foundation of gold. Now there may be in Lombard Street, and often is, a vast amount of “credit,” but merchants and the public have not the confidence to use it. Why? To quote Mr. Withers: “Credit depends on the assumption that goods produced will come to market and be sold and that securities that are based on the earning power of production will fetch a price on the exchanges of the world.” In other words, if we have no confidence in the future, we are afraid to spend our money. So we eke it out, or hoard it, or practise thrift and live in misery. And if we cease to buy we cease to consume, production diminishes, goods perish in markets, and men are thrown out of employment. When we say the credit of the British Government stands high, we do not mean that the credit-money of the Government has a high value, or price. We mean that confidence in the British Government--that is, in the British nation--is exceedingly strong. When, therefore, foreigners buy British Consols they buy them because they know they can have strong confidence in British wealth and British character: not because our joint stock banks have high gold reserves, nor because London is the world’s banker and a free market for gold. Foreigners know that our gold reserves are insignificant compared with the gold reserves of the leading continental countries, but they know that Great Britain is the richest and the _greatest_ country in the world, and the British Empire the richest and greatest empire the world has seen.