as ever it
was, but it has been complicated by a political objection that if one
happens to go to war with a nation that has supplied raw material, or
half-raw material, for industries that are essential to our commercial
if not to our actual existence, the good profits made in time of peace
are likely to be wiped out, or worse, by the extent of the inconvenience
and paralysis that this dependence brings with it in time of war. And
even if we are not at war with our providers, the greater danger and
cost of carriage by sea, when war is afoot, makes us question the
advantage of the process, for example, by which we have developed a
foreign dairying industry with our capital, and learnt to depend on it
for a large part of our supply of eggs and butter, while at home we have
seen a great magnate lay waste farms in order to make fruitful land into
a wilderness for himself and his deer. It may have paid us to let this
be done if we were sure of peace, but now that we have seen what modern
warfare means, when it breaks out on a big scale, we may surely begin to
think that people who make bracken grow in place of wheat, in order to
improve what auctioneers call the amenities of their rural residences,
are putting their personal gratification first in a question which is of
national importance.

We may seem to have strayed far from the problems of International
Finance and the free interchange of capital between countries, but in
fact we are in the very middle of them, because they are so complicated
and diverse that they affect nearly every aspect of our national lives.
By sending capital abroad we make other countries produce for us and so
we help a tendency by which we grow less at home, and export coupons, or
demands for interest, instead of the present produce of our brains and
muscles; and we do much more than that, for we thereby encourage the
best of our workers to leave our shores and seek their fortunes in the
new lands which our capital opens up. When we export capital it goes in
the shape of goods and services, and it is followed by an export of men,
who go to lands where land is plentiful and cheap, and men are scarce
and well paid. This process again was sound enough from the purely
economic point of view. It quickened the growth of the world's wealth by
putting men of enterprise in places where their work was most handsomely
rewarded, and their lives were unhampered by the many bars to success
that remnants of fe