s no time for profit-making, but for hard and ill-paid work, with
depleted staffs, to help the great task of financing a great war. The
Stock Exchange is half empty and nearly idle. It is tied and bound by
all sorts of regulations in its dealings, and its members have probably
suffered as severely from the war as any section of the community. The
first interest of the City is unquestionably peace; and the fact that
the City is nevertheless full of fine, full-flavoured patriotic fervour
only shows that it is ready and eager to sink its interests in favour of
those of its country.

Every knot that international finance ties between one country and
another makes people in those two countries interested in their mutual
good relations. The thing is so obvious, that, when one considers the
number of these knots that have been tied since international finance
first began to gather capital from one country's investors and place it
at the disposal of others for the development of their resources, one
can only marvel that the course of international goodwill has not made
further progress. The fact that it is still a remarkably tender plant,
likely to be crushed and withered by any breath of popular prejudice, is
rather a comforting evidence of the slight importance that mankind
attaches to the question of its bread and butter. It is clear that a
purely material consideration, such as the interests of international
finance, and the desire of those who have invested abroad to receive
their dividends, weighs very little in the balance when the nations
think that their honour or their national interests are at stake. Since
the gilded cords of trade and finance have knit all the world into one
great market, the proposition that war does not pay has become
self-evident to any one who will give the question a few minutes'
thought. International finance is a peacemaker every time it sends a
British pound into a foreign country. But its influence as a peacemaker
is astonishingly feeble just for this reason, that its appeal is to an
interest which mankind very rightly disregards whenever it feels that
more weighty matters are in question. The fact that war does not pay is
an argument that is listened to as little by a nation when its blood is
up, as the fact that being in love does not pay would be heeded by an
amorous undergraduate.

If, then, the voice of international finance is so feeble when it is
raised against the terrible scourge