vertrading or living on too lavish a scale it would at once be
noticed and reported.

Nevertheless, international finance made steady progress through
somewhat obscure beginnings. We know that Philip II of Spain was heavily
indebted to moneylenders all over the Continent, and that by his famous
repudiation he carried consternation throughout Europe.[28] Edward III
was also heavily indebted to Florentine bankers, and he also omitted to
pay his debt; and it is said that the descendants of the Florentine
bankers still have a claim against the English Crown in
consequence[29]; but it was not until after the creation of stock
exchanges and the machinery of a public market in securities that
international finance became a question of general importance.

Here also the effect has been for unity combined with a good deal of
disunion. Twenty years ago it used to be said that feeling in the
Western States of America was very strongly anti-English because most of
the Western farmers were indebted to English moneylenders, and on the
whole it may be said that the relations between the borrower and lender
are not likely to be so friendly and so likely to promote unity as those
between buyer and seller. There is really no logical reason why this
should be so: the basis of the bargain between the two is exactly the
same. In commercial transactions one man sells to another because the
other man wants something that he has got more than he does. It is
exactly the same with the borrower and lender of money. A man borrows
because he wants money and is prepared to pay a rate of interest for it.
The lender lends because he has money to lend and wants to earn interest
on it. Nevertheless there is something in this relationship which seems
to produce discord. It is not many years since the Australian newspapers
used to talk of England as John Bull Cohen, implying that the English
money market made more than it ought to do by developing, with the help
of its financial resources, the production and commerce of the young
countries of the world. Perhaps it is human to feel a grudge against a
creditor, because the money has to be paid back, whereas a commercial
bargain is done with. Nevertheless, after allowing for all the friction
that money-lending seems to produce, there can be no question that the
establishment of the international market in securities has enormously
widened the world's output of commodities, and it has greatly promoted
that u