India Company with all the possibilities of gold and glory which
attended that romantic eighteenth-century enterprise. Perhaps another
Clive or a second Hastings is somewhere in the making.

That the British Government proposes to follow the German lead and
definitely go into business--thus reversing its tradition of aloofness
from financial enterprise--is shown in the new British and Italian
Corporation, formed to establish close economic relations between
Britain and Italy. It starts a whole era in British banking, for it
means the subsidising of a private undertaking out of national funds.

It embodies a meaning that goes deeper and travels much farther than
this. Up to the outbreak of the great war Germany was the banker of
Italy. Cities like Milan and Rome were almost completely in the grip of
the Teutonic lender, and his country cashed in strong on this surest and
hardest of all dominations. This was the one big reason why the Italian
declaration of war against Germany was so long delayed. With this new
banking corporation England not only supplants the German influence but
forges the economic irons that will bind Italy to her.

The capital of the British and Italian Corporation is nominally only
five million dollars. The government, however, agrees to contribute
during each of the first ten years of its existence the sum of two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Though imperial stimulation of trade
is one of its main objects, this institution is not without its larger
political value. As this and many other similar enterprises show,
politics and world trade, so far as Great Britain is concerned, will
hereafter be closely interwoven.

Throughout all this British organisation runs the increasing purpose of