Hartley Withers

“ Such was the history of Becket’s shrine. We have dwelt on it at some length because it is no exaggeration to say that in the Middle Ages Canterbury Cathedral owed its European fame and enormous riches to the fact that it contained the shrine within its walls, and because the story of the influence of the Saint and the miracles that he worked, and the millions of pilgrims who flocked from the whole civilized world to do homage to him, throws a brighter and more vivid light on the lives and thoughts and beliefs of mediæval men than many volumes stuffed with historical research. ”

“ If there were innumerable millions of workers and only one saver with money enough to start one factory, the one saver would be able to name his own terms in arranging his wages bill, and the salaries of his managers and clerks. If the wind were on the other cheek, and a crowd of capitalists with countless millions of money were eager to set the wheels of industry going, and could not find enough workers to man and organize and manage their workshops, then the workers would have the whip hand. ”

“ Something can be done by banks and financiers in supplying credit in the form of advances and acceptances; but this method is only like oiling the wheel of industry, the real driving power of which has to be saved capital. Creating credits simply means that a certain amount of buying power is manufactured and handed over to those to whom the credit is given. It does not set free any labour or goods to be put into industry. That is only done by the man who abstains from consumption and saves money by restraining his desire to spend it on himself, and puts it at the disposal of industry. ”

“ Finance is a mighty influence, but it is a mere piece of machinery which assists, quickens, and lives on production. The men who make and grow things, and carry them from the place where they are made and grown to the place where they are wanted, these are the men who furnish the raw material of finance, without which it would have to shut up its shop.
If they and their work ceased, we should all starve, and the financiers would have nothing behind the pieces of paper that they handle. ”

“ Every one expects with confidence to see, when the war is over, a miraculous recovery in France produced by the same spirit which worked miracles after the war of 1871, aided and abetted by the subsequent improvement in man's control over the forces of nature, and also by the deep and world-wide sympathy which all will feel for France as the champion of freedom who has suffered most severely in its cause during the war. But it is impossible to expect, after what France has suffered, that she will be, for some time, in a position seriously to challenge London as a financial rival. ”

“ The more wealthy they grow, the more goods they produce want to sell to us, and they cannot sell to us unless they likewise buy from us. If we helped Germany to grow rich, we also helped her to become one of our best customers and so to help us to grow rich. Trade is nothing but an exchange of goods and services. Other countries are not so philanthropic as to kill our trade by making us presents of their products and from the strictly economic point of view, it pays us to see all the world, which is our market, a thriving hive of industry eager to sell us as as it can. ”

“ It is surely evident that a financial supremacy which was based merely on a jobbing business, gathering in capital from one nation and lending it to another, would be an extremely precarious and artificial structure, the continuance of which could not be relied on for many decades. Finance can only flourish healthily and wholesomely in a country which produces a considerable surplus of goods and services which it is prepared to place at the disposal of the world. ”

“ By our preference for "brilliant" investments, with a high rate of interest and bad security, we invite the floating of rotten companies and waterlogged loans. By our readiness to be deafened by the clamour of the advertiser into buying things that we do not want, we hand industry over to the hands of the loudest shouter, and by our half-educated laziness in our selection of what we read and of the entertainments that we frequent, we open the way to opulence through the debauching of our taste and opinions. ”

“ If there is a great reaction, and everybody's one desire is to throw this nightmare of war off their chests and go back to the times as they were before it happened, then all that the war has taught us about the production of capital will have been wasted. But I rather doubt whether this will be so. Saving merely means the diversion of a certain proportion of the output of industry into the further equipment of industry. The war has taught us lessons which, if we use them aright, will help us to increase enormously the output of industry. ”

“ It is easy, however, to exaggerate the effect of the war on our power to finance other peoples. Pessimistic observers, with a pacifist turn of mind, who regard all war as a hideous barbarism and refuse to see that anything good can come out of it, are apt in these days to make our flesh creep by telling us that war will inevitably leave Europe so exhausted and impoverished that its financial future is a prospect of unmitigated gloom. ”

“ Mr Kitson glances "at a few elementary truths." "Wealth," he says, "is the product of two prime factors, man and Nature, generally termed labour and land. With an unlimited, or practically unlimited, supply of these two factors, how is it that wealth is and has been hitherto so comparatively scarce?" But is the supply of "man" unlimited in the sense of man able, willing, and properly trained to work? And is the supply of "Nature" unlimited in the sense of land, mines, and factories fully equipped with the right machinery and served and supplied by adequate means of transport? ”

“ This is surely something solid on the credit side of the balance sheet, though it would be a good deal more so if mankind had made better progress with the much more difficult problem of using and distributing its wealth. If the rapid increase of wealth merely means that honest citizens, who find it as hard as ever to earn a living, are to be splashed with more mud from more motor-cars full of more road hogs, then there is little wonder if the results of international finance produce a feeling of disillusionment. ”

“ The man who saves money, who has always hitherto been rather despised by his companions and resented by a certain class of social reformer and many other uneducated people as a capitalist bloodsucker, is thus, in fact, the person who leaves the world richer than he found it, having put his money, the product of his own work, into increasing the world's output, instead of spending it on such forms of enjoyment as heavy lunches and cinema shows. ”

“ Since the gilded cords of trade and finance have knit all the world into one great market, the proposition that war does not pay has become self-evident to any one who will give the question a few minutes' thought. International finance is a peacemaker every time it sends a British pound into a foreign country. But its influence as a peacemaker is astonishingly feeble just for this reason, that its appeal is to an interest which mankind very rightly disregards whenever it feels that more weighty matters are in question. ”

“ That this huge problem can be solved, and solved so well that the country can go ahead to a great period of increased productivity and prosperity, I fully believe; but this can only be done if it is able to command the most efficient co-operation of all the various factors in production—if employers put their best brains and if workers put their best energy into the business, and if everything is done to make the whole machinery work with the utmost possible smoothness. One element in the machinery, and a highly important one, is the question of capital. ”

“ If the war teaches us to work hard and consume little, so that when peace comes we shall have a great volume of goods to export, there is no reason why the bill on London should not retain much if not all of its old prestige and supremacy in the marts of the world. For we must always remember that finance is only the handmaid of industry. She is often a pert handmaid who steals her mistress's clothes and tries to flaunt before the world as the mistress, and so she sometimes imposes on many people who ought to know better, who think that finance is an all-powerful influence. ”

“ It is inevitable that the working classes, finding themselves subjected to a rise in prices, the cause of which they do not understand, but the result of which they see to be a great decrease in the buying power of their wages, should believe that they are being exploited by profiteers, that the rich classes are growing richer at their expense out of the war, and that they and the country are being bled by a set of unpatriotic capitalist blood-suckers. ”

“ Economists define capital as wealth reserved for production, and we must always remember that money is only a claim for, or a right to, a certain amount of goods or a certain amount of other people's work. Money is only a title to wealth, because if I have a sovereign or a one-pound note in my pocket, I thereby have the power of buying a pound's worth of goods or of hiring a doctor to cure me or a parson to bury me or anybody else to do anything that I want, up to the buying power of that sovereign. ”

“ The whole idea that Germany's achievement has been such as to warrant any attempt on our part to model our institutions on her pattern seems to me to fall to pieces as soon as one looks calmly at the actual results produced by the different systems. Moreover, even if we were to admit that Germany's achievement in the war has been immeasurably greater than ours, it still would not follow that we could improve matters here by following the German system. It ought not to be necessary to observe that a system which is good for one nation or individual is not necessarily good for another. ”

“ As the world developed its productive power, its goods poured into us, as the great free mart where all men were welcome to sell their wares. These goods came in exchange for our goods and services, and the more we bought the more we sold. When other nations took to dealing direct with one another, they wanted our capital to finance the business, and our ships to carry the goods. The world as a whole could not grow in wealth without enriching the people that was the greatest buyer and seller, the greatest moneylender and the greatest carrier. ”