groups of mankind. International Finance makes a series of bargains
between one nation and another, for the mutual benefit of each,
complicated by occasional blunders, some robbery, and, in exceptional
cases, horrible brutality. Religion has stained history with the most
ruthless massacres, and the most unspeakable ingenuity in torture, all
devised for the glory of God, and the furtherance of what its devotees
believed to be His word. International politics have plunged mankind
into a series of bloody and destructive wars, culminating in the present
cataclysm. Finance can only prosper through production; its efforts are
inevitably failures, if they do not tend to the growing and making of
things, or the production of services, that are wanted. Destruction,
reduced to a fine art and embellished by the nicest ingenuities of the
most carefully applied science, is the weapon of international politics.

_Note_.--The names of the actors in the Honduras drama were
printed in blank because it seemed unfair to do otherwise,
in revising fifty years' old scandals, as an example of what
International Finance can do at its worst.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: _Merchant of Venice_, I, 3.]

[Footnote 6: Pages 75, 76. (NOTE: See Chapter IV, "In the beginnings of international trade...")]




CHAPTER VII