if mankind had made better progress with the much more difficult problem
of using and distributing its wealth. If the rapid increase of wealth
merely means that honest citizens, who find it as hard as ever to earn a
living, are to be splashed with more mud from more motor-cars full of
more road hogs, then there is little wonder if the results of
international finance produce a feeling of disillusionment. But at least
it must be admitted that the stuff has to be grown and made before it
can be shared, and that a great advance has been made even in the
general distribution of comfort. If we still find it hard to make a
living, that is partly because we have very considerably expanded,
during the course of the last generation or two, our notion of what we
mean by a living.

As to the sinister influence alleged to be wielded by international
finance in the councils of diplomacy, it has been shown that war on a
great scale terrifies finance and inflicts great distress on it. To
suppose, therefore, that finance is interested in the promotion of such
wars is to suppose that it is a power shortsighted to the point of
imbecility. In the case of wars which finance is believed with some
truth to have helped to instigate, we have seen that it could not have
done so if other influences had not helped it. In short, both the
occurrence of the present war, and the circumstances that led up to war
in Egypt and South Africa, have shown how little power finance wields in
the realm of foreign politics. In the City if one suggests that our
Foreign Office is swayed by financial influences one is met by
incredulous mockery, probably accompanied by assertions that the
Foreign Office is, in fact, neglectful, to a fault, of British financial
interests abroad, and that when it does, as in China, interfere with
financial matters, it is apt to tie the hands of finance, in order to
further what it believes to be the political interests of the country.