y other
part of the world can show? Here we have to acknowledge at once,
freely and frankly, that, as compared with New York, we shall have
gone backward.

America will have been enormously enriched by the war, which we shall
certainly have not. America will have been opening up channels of
international trade and international finance, and so New York will
have been gaining at the expense of London. It is certain that when
the war is over America's dependence upon London for credits against
the shipments of goods to and from her shores will have been very
greatly lessened, if not altogether a thing of the past.

This change would have happened any way, war or no war, but it has
been greatly quickened by the war. Before the war America was already
making arrangements, under her new banking system, to promote the
machinery for acceptance and discount, in order that goods sent to her
from foreign countries should be financed by bills drawn on American
banks and houses in dollars instead of on English banks and houses in
sterling.

Apart from this development, which would have happened in any case, it
remains to be seen how far New York will be in a position to act as
a rival of London as the world's financial centre. The internal
resources and potentialities of America are so enormous, and there is
such a vast amount of work to be done in developing them and bringing
them to full fruition, that it does not at all follow that America
will yet be inclined to take the position in international trade and
finance which will one day surely be hers, when she has done all the
work that is waiting to be done in her own back premises.

America has a new banking and monetary system on trial which has met
the difficult problems of the war with great success. These problems,
however, are not nearly as complicated and various as those which are
likely to arise in time of peace. When a nation is turning out an
enormous amount of goods for which the rest of the world is prepared
to pay any price, her finance is a comparatively simple business. Even
now, when America has assumed the duty of financing a large number of
Allies impoverished by three years of war which have been enriching
her, she is still simplifying the problem by restricting her advances
to the payment for goods bought in America.

That New York will be greatly strengthened by the war, which has
brought masses of American securities back to the country of origin
and