h
Finance and a Premature Peace," calling attention to this danger and
urging the need for guarding against it. First too bellicose and now too
pacific, High Finance is buffeted and spat upon by men of peace and men
of war with a unanimity that must puzzle it. It can hardly err on both
sides, but of the two accusers I think that Mr. Crammond is much more
likely to be right. But my own personal opinion is that both these
accusers are mistaken, that the financiers never wanted war, that if
(which I beg to doubt) diplomacy conducted in their interests produced
the war, that was because diplomacy misunderstood and bungled their
interests, and that now that the war is upon us, the financiers, though
all their interests urge them to want peace, would never be parties to
intrigues for a peace that was premature or ill-judged.

Perhaps I have a weakness for financiers, but if so it is entitled to
some respect, because it is based on closer knowledge of them than is
owned by most of their critics. For years it was my business as a City
journalist, to see them day by day; and this daily intercourse with
financiers has taught me that the popular delusion that depicts them as
hard, cruel, ruthless men, living on the blood and sweat of humanity,
and engulfed to their eyebrows in their own sordid interests, is about
as absurd a hallucination as the stage Irishman. Financiers are quite
human--quiet, mild, good-natured people as a rule, many of them spending
much time and trouble on good works in their leisure hours. What they
want as financiers is plenty of good business and as little as possible
disturbance in the orderly course of affairs. Such a cataclysm as the
present war could only terrify them, especially those with interests in
every country of the world. When war comes, especially such a war as
this, financing in its ordinary and most profitable sense has to put up
its shutters. Nobody can come to London now for loans except the
British, or French, Governments, or, occasionally, one of our colonies.
Any other borrower is warned off the field by a ruthless Committee whose
leave has to be granted before dealings in new securities are allowed on
the Stock Exchange. But when the British Government borrows, there are
no profits for the rank and file of financiers. No underwriting is
necessary, and the business is carried out by the Bank of England. The
commissions earned by brokers are smaller, and the whole City feels that
this i