om the growing wealth of other nations. The
more wealthy they grow, the more goods they produce want to sell to us,
and they cannot sell to us unless they likewise buy from us. If we
helped Germany to grow rich, we also helped her to become one of our
best customers and so to help us to grow rich. Trade is nothing but an
exchange of goods and services. Other countries are not so philanthropic
as to kill our trade by making us presents of their products and from
the strictly economic point of view, it pays us to see all the world,
which is our market, a thriving hive of industry eager to sell us as as
it can. It may be that as other countries, with the help of our capital
and example, develop industries in which we have been pre-eminent, they
may force us to supply them with services of which we are less proud to
be the producers. If, for example, the Americans were to drive us out of
the neutral markets with their cotton goods, and then spent their
profits by revelling in our hotels and thronging out theatres and
shooting in Highland deer forests, and buying positions in English
society for their daughters we should feel that the course of industry
might still be profitable to us, but that it was less satisfactory. On
the other hand, it would be absurd for us to expect the rest of the
world to stand still industrially in order that we may make profits from
producing things for it that it is quite able to make for itself.

For the present we are concerned with the benefits of international
finance, which have been shown to begin with its enormous importance as
the handmaid of international trade. Trade between nations is desirable
for exactly the same reason as trade between one man and another,
namely, that each is, naturally or otherwise, better fitted to grow or
make certain things, and so an exchange is to their mutual advantage. If
this is so, as it clearly is, in the case of two men living in the same
street, it is evidently very much more so in the case of two peoples
living in different climates and on different soils, and so each of
them, by the nature of their surroundings, able to make and grow things
that are impossible to the other. English investors, by developing the
resources of other countries, through the machinery of international
finance, enable us to sit at home in this inclement isle, and enjoy the
fruits of tropical skies and soils. It may be true that if they had not
done so we should have develope