s have plunged mankind
into a series of bloody and destructive wars, culminating in the present
cataclysm. Finance can only prosper through production; its efforts are
inevitably failures, if they do not tend to the growing and making of
things, or the production of services, that are wanted. Destruction,
reduced to a fine art and embellished by the nicest ingenuities of the
most carefully applied science, is the weapon of international politics.

_Note_.--The names of the actors in the Honduras drama were
printed in blank because it seemed unfair to do otherwise,
in revising fifty years' old scandals, as an example of what
International Finance can do at its worst.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: _Merchant of Venice_, I, 3.]

[Footnote 6: Pages 75, 76. (NOTE: See Chapter IV, "In the beginnings of international trade...")]

CHAPTER VII

NATIONALISM AND FINANCE

So far we have considered the working of International Finance chiefly
from the point of view of its effects upon the prosperity and comfort of
mankind as a whole and on this country, as the greatest trader, carrier,
and financier of the world. We have seen that the benefit that it works
is wrought chiefly through specialization, that is, through the
production of the good things of the earth in the lands best fitted, by
climate or otherwise, to grow and make them. By lending money to other
lands, and the goods and service that they have bought with it, we have
helped them to produce things for us to consume, or to work up into
other things for our consumption or that of other peoples. Thereby we
have enriched ourselves and the rest of mankind. But the question still
arises whether this process is one that should be left altogether
unchecked, or whether it involves evils which go far to modify its
benefits. In other words is it a good thing for us, socially and
politically, to enrich ourselves beyond a certain point by a process
which involves our dependence on other countries for food and raw
material?

Analogy between a State and a man is often useful, if not pushed too
far. The original man in a primitive state is always assumed to have
been bound to find or make everything that he wanted by his own
exertions. He was hut builder, hunter, cultivator, bow-maker,
arrow-maker, trapper, fisherman, boat-builder, leather-dresser, tailor,
fighter--a wonderfully versatile and self-sufficient person. As the
process grew up of specializati