stment will "pay."

The investor who has used up the cream of the home investment market
turns his eyes abroad. As a recent writer has suggested, "There is a
glamor about the foreign investment" which does not hold for a domestic
one. Foreign investments have yielded such huge returns in the past that
there is always a seeming possibility of wonderful gains for the future.
The risk is greater, of course, but this is more than offset by the
increased rate of return. If it were not so, the wealth would be
invested at home or held idle.

4. _The Great Investing Nations_

The great industrial nations are the great investing nations. An
agriculture community produces little surplus wealth. Land values are
low, franchises and special privileges are negligible factors. There can
be relatively little speculation. Changes in method of production are
infrequent. Changes in values and total wealth are gradual. The owning
class in an agriculture civilization may live comfortably. If it is very
small in proportion to the total population it may live luxuriously, but
it cannot derive great revenues such as those secured by the owning
classes of an industrial civilization.

Industrial civilization possesses all of the factors for augmenting
surplus wealth which are lacking in agricultural civilizations. Changes
in the forms of industrial production are rapid; special privilege
yields rich returns and is the subject of wide speculative activity;
land values increase; labor saving machinery multiplies man's capacity
to turn out wealth. As much surplus wealth might be produced in a year
of this industrial life as could have been turned out in a generation or
a century of agricultural activity or of hand-craft industry.

England, France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Japan and the United States,
the great industrial nations, have become the great lending nations.
Their search for "undeveloped territory" and "spheres of influence" is
not a search for trade, but for an opportunity to invest and exploit. If
these nations wished to exchange cotton for coffee, or machinery for
wheat on even terms, they could exchange with one another, or with one
of the undeveloped countries, but they demand an outlet for surplus
wealth--an outlet that can only be utilized where the government of the
developed country will guarantee the investment of its citizens in the
undeveloped territory.

The investing nations either want to take the raw products of