s of English factories. Some acted as the agents
of steamboat companies, arranging for freights and settling the
destinations of ships which went voyaging. Some grew wheat or bred
cattle. Like all Englishmen whose lot is cast in far countries they
retained their feeling for England as a home and became conscious as
Englishmen in England seldom are, of love for their own land. Like all
Englishmen they grumbled ceaselessly at what they loved.

They spoke with contempt of everything English. They abused English
business methods and complained that Germans were ousting Englishmen
from the markets of the world. They derided English Government
and English statesmanship, ignoring party loyalties with a fine
impartiality. They decried English social customs, contrasting the
freedom of life in the land of their adoption with the convention-bound
ways of their home. Yet it always was their home. I felt that, even when
their contempt expressed itself in the bitterest words.

Whatever their opinions were or their affectations, however widely
their various activities were separated, these men were all consciously
dependent on the smooth working of the system of world-wide credit.

They were Ascher's clients, or if not Ascher's, the clients of others
like Ascher. They were in a sense Ascher's dependents. They were united
to England, to Europe, to each other, by Ascher's threads. Whether they
bred cattle and sold them, whether they grew corn, whether they shipped
cargoes or imported merchandise, the gossamer net was over them.

I returned to London with these impressions vivid in my mind, perhaps--I
tried to persuade myself of this--too vivid. I had travelled, so I
argued, under the shadow of a great banker. I had gone among bankers.
It was natural, inevitable, that I should see the world through
bankers' eyes. Perhaps credit was not after all the life blood of our
civilisation. I failed to convince myself. The very fact that I could
go so far under the shadow of a bank proves how large a shadow a bank
throws. The fact that Ascher's correspondents brought me into touch with
every kind of man, goes to show that banking has permeated, leavened
life, that human society is saturated with finance.

In a very few months, before the end of the summer which followed my
home-coming, I was to see the whole machine stop working suddenly. The
war god stalked across the world and brushed aside, broke, tore, tangled
up, the gossamer threads. Th