at it
is buying back. Against this we shall be able to set debts due to us
from our Allies, but if our borrowings and sales of securities exceed
our lendings as the war goes on, we shall thereby be poorer. Our power
as a creditor country will be less, until by hard work and strict saving
we have restored it. This we can very quickly do, if we remember and
apply the lessons that war is teaching us about the number of people
able to work, whose capacity was hitherto left fallow, that this country
contained, and also about the ease with which we can dispense, when a
great crisis makes us sensible, with many of the absurdities and
futilities on which much of our money, and productive capacity, used to
be wasted.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: "United Netherlands," chap. xxxii.]

CHAPTER V

THE BENEFITS OF INTERNATIONAL FINANCE

When once we have recognized how close is the connection between finance
and trade, we have gone a long way towards seeing the greatness of the
service that finance renders to mankind, whether it works at home or
abroad. At home we owe our factories and our railways and all the
marvellous equipment of our power to make things that are wanted, to the
quiet, prosaic, and often rather mean and timorous people who have saved
money for a rainy day, and put it into industry instead of into
satisfying their immediate wants and cravings for comfort and enjoyment
It is equally, perhaps still more, true, that we owe them to the brains
and energy of those who have planned and organized the equipment of
industry, and the thews and sinews of those who have done the heavy
work. But brain and muscle would have been alike powerless if there had
not been saving folk who lent them raw material, and provided them with
the means of livelihood in the interval between the beginning of an
industry and the day when its product is sold and paid for.

Abroad, the work of finance has been even more advantageous to mankind,
for since it has been shown that international finance is a necessary
part of the machinery of international trade, it follows that all the
benefits, economic and other, which international trade has wrought for
us, are inseparably and inevitably bound up with the progress of
international finance. If we had never fertilized the uttermost parts of
the earth by lending them money and sending them goods in payment of the
sums lent, we never could have enjoyed the stream that pours in from
them of ra