, has become over-plentiful, less lucrative
use can only be found for the excess. This excess, not being able to
earn so much as when capital was less plentiful, competes for safe
investments and forces down the interest rate on all capital. Mr.
Charles A. Conant has well described the keenness of the scramble for
safe investments, even at the prevailing low rates of interest. At the
close of the war with Turkey, the Greek loan, guaranteed by Great
Britain, France, and Russia, was floated with striking ease. Regardless
of the small return, the amount offered at Paris, (41,000,000 francs),
was subscribed for twenty-three times over. Great Britain, France,
Germany, Holland, and the Scandinavian States, of recent years, have all
engaged in converting their securities from 5 per cents to 4 per cents,
from 4.5 per cents to 3.5 per cents, and the 3.5 per cents into 3 per
cents.

Great Britain, France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, according to the
calculation taken in 1895 by the International Statistical Institute,
hold forty-six billions of capital invested in negotiable securities
alone. Yet Paris subscribed for her portion of the Greek loan
twenty-three times over! In short, money is cheap. Andrew Carnegie and
his brother bourgeois kings give away millions annually, but still the
tide wells up. These vast accumulations have made possible
"wild-catting," fraudulent combinations, fake enterprises, Hooleyism; but
such stealings, great though they be, have little or no effect in
reducing the volume. The time is past when startling inventions, or
revolutions in the method of production, can break up the growing
congestion; yet this saved capital demands an outlet, somewhere, somehow.

When a great nation has equipped itself to produce far more than it can,
under the present division of the product, consume, it seeks other
markets for its surplus products. When a second nation finds itself
similarly circumstanced, competition for these other markets naturally
follows. With the advent of a third, a fourth, a fifth, and of divers
other nations, the question of the disposal of surplus products grows
serious. And with each of these nations possessing, over and beyond its
active capital, great and growing masses of idle capital, and when the
very foreign markets for which they are competing are beginning to
produce similar wares for themselves, the question passes the serious
stage and becomes critical.

Never has th