w material and cheap food which has sustained our industry,
fed our population, and given us a standard of general comfort such as
our forefathers could never have imagined. It is true that at the same
time we have benefited others, besides our own customers and debtors.
We have opened up the world to trade and other countries reap an
advantage by being able to use the openings that we have made. It is
sometimes argued that we have in fact merely made the paths of our
competitors straight, and that by covering Argentina with a network of
railways and so enormously increasing its power to grow things and so to
buy things, we have been making an opportunity for German shipbuilders
to send liners to the Plate and for German manufacturers to undersell
ours with cheap hardware and cotton goods. This is, undoubtedly, true.
The great industrial expansion of Germany between 1871 and 1914, has
certainly been helped by the paths opened for it all over the world by
English trade and finance; and America, our lusty young rival, that is
gaining so much strength from the war in which Europe is weakening
itself industrially and financially, will owe much of the ease of her
prospective expansion to spade-work done by the sleepy Britishers. It
may almost be said that we and France as the great providers of capital
to other countries have made a world-wide trade possible on its present
scale. The work we have done for our own benefit has certainly helped
others, but it does not, therefore, follow that it has damaged us.

Looking at the matter from a purely business point of view, we see that
the great forward movement in trade and finance that we have led and
fostered, has helped us even by helping our rivals. In the first place,
it gives us a direct benefit as the owners of the mightiest fleet of
merchant ships that the world has seen. We do nearly half the world's
carrying trade, and so have reason to rejoice when other nations send
goods to the ports that we have opened. By our eminence in finance and
the prestige of a bill of exchange drawn on London, we have also
supplied the credit by which goods have been paid for in the country of
their origin, and nursed until they have come to the land in which they
are wanted, and even until the day when they have been turned into a
finished product and passed into the hands of the final consumer. But
there is also the indirect advantage that we gain, as a nation of
producers and financiers, fr