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 developed the resources of our own country more
thoroughly, using it less as a pleasure ground, and more as a farm and
kitchen garden, and that we should have had a larger number of our own
folk working for us under our own sky. Instead of thriving on the
produce of foreign climes and foreign labour that comes to us to pay
interest, we should have lived more on home-made stuff and had more
healthy citizens at work on our soil. On the other hand, we should have
been hit hard by bad seasons and we should have enjoyed a much less
diversified diet. As it is, we take our tea and tobacco and coffee and
sugar and wine and oranges and bananas and cheap bread and meat, all as
a matter of course, but we could never have enjoyed them if
international trade had not brought them to our shores, and if
international finance had not quickened and cheapened their growth and
transport and marketing. International trade and finance, if given a
free hand, may be trusted to bring about, between them, the utmost
possible development of the power of the world to grow and make things
in the places where they can be grown and made most cheaply and
abundantly, in other words, to secure for human effort, working on the
available raw material, the greatest possible harvest as the reward of
its exertions.

All this is very obvious and very material, but international finance
does much more, for it is a great educator and a mighty missionary of