first appealed to. Then laws were passed. People are "requested" to
give up their jewelry, to make a patriotic sacrifice of it for the
Fatherland. Cards are printed in the newspapers urging the people for
the sake of the Fatherland to bring all their gold into the Reichsbank.

So fine is the search for gold that wedding rings are given from the
fingers of the women, and iron rings are substituted as badges of
patriotism.

While every other nation on earth since 1900 has been accumulating gold
in bank reserve, England alone has stood aloof and accumulated credit
instead of gold. English financiers laugh at gold except as it can be
made useful. They prefer to hold interest-bearing promises to pay
gold. To-day England holds the keys to the world's gold outside of
Germany, and I have a suspicion that she is not averse to American
cotton going into Germany if it takes out the gold in return.

Germany is young as a banking, trading, and industrial nation. England
insists that both men and gold must be at work. In Germany the gold
reserve must be maintained and, with foreign trade cut off, men must be
idle. In England both the gold and the men are at work. Labor was
never better employed in England than to-day. The English policy in
this wartime is to fill every idle hand with productive industry; to
work the machinery day and night; and to keep the gold in England so
far as is necessary and to keep it circulating in England. The
national loss begins when you lose either the golden days of labor, the
gold of the sunshine that makes the harvest of the valleys or the gold
of finance and commerce.

When the Germans fought the French in 1870, 60 per cent of her people