I have lived most of my life here, and I have
built up my business on an English foundation. I have been able to build
it up because I had ready made for me that foundation of integrity which
your English merchants have established by centuries of honest dealing.
Without that--if the world had not believed that my business was
English, and therefore stable, I could not have built at all or should
have built with much greater difficulty. My bank is English, though I,
who control it, am not. If I go back to my own people now, now when it
seems treachery to desert them, the whole machinery of the vast system
of credit which I guide will cease to work, will break to fragments. Of
my own loss I say nothing, indeed I think nothing. But what of the
other men, thousands of them who are involved with me, whose affairs
are inextricably mixed with mine, who have trusted not me, but my bank,
trusted it because it is an English institution? And it is English. Have
I the right to ruin them and to break up my bank, which belongs to your
nation, of which in a sense I am no more than a trustee for England? You
understand, do you not? My bank is just as certainly of English birth as
I am of German birth. Yet it and I are one. We cannot be divided. What
am I to do?"

Ascher was asking questions; but I did not think that he was asking them
of me. I felt that it was my part to listen, not to answer. Besides
what could I answer? Ascher had given me a glimpse of one of those
intolerable dilemmas from which there is no way of escape. The choice
between right and wrong, when the nobler and baser parts of our nature
are in conflict, is often very difficult and painful. But there are
times--this was one of them--when two of the nobler, two of the very
noblest of our instincts, are set against each other. When we can only
do right by doing wrong at the same time, when to be loyal we must turn
traitors.

When Ascher spoke again he seemed to have drifted away from the subject
of the coming war, the financial catastrophe and his own trouble. I did
not, for some time, guess where his words were leading.

"I have been a very careful observer of English life," he said, "ever
since I first came to this country, and no class in your nation has
interested me more than you minor gentry, the second grade of your
aristocracy."

"Often spoken of as the squirearchy," I said. "It is generally supposed
to be the most useless and the least intelligent part of