The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-03-04
INVESTMENT vs. WAR.

Modern Finance Is a Bond That
 Keeps Nations Together.
 King Edward draws more revenue in interest on American securities held by his royal household than George III ever exacted from the American colonies, says Harold Bolce in Apple tons Magazine. There is no tariff wall, among the nearly two hundred on earth, high enough to keep out invest ment. Just as the use of gunpowder demolished the ancient walls that were proof against the crude weap- ons of the barbarians, so the finance of modern times has made mockery of the tariff maintained with great expense and jubilant patriotism on the borderand of the nations.
 The foreign relations to-day cost vastly more than the profit made on international commerce. The states men and kings who are ordering battleships and mobilizing new armies are not the business managers of the world. The peace promoters nave been | trying to substitute the Doxology for | the Marseillaise The best and bravest blood of the feudal ages was ravished | in the effort to redeem sacred places of the Holy, East from the feet of the | inhdel To- day the Christian powers could convene at The Hague and by international resolution demand in five minutes the graves and other sacred places of the Levant from the weaker nations that now hold sovereignty lthere They could, if they could find 1t, insist that the Garden of Eden be set apart as an international pak for IChristian pilgrims. But there is no commercial intrest in these matters, ,l and they are not considered.
 When the new internationalism forces reciprocity upon congresses and pariaments, as 1t is rapidly doing, the world will forget that the dispensa- ton of commercial peace was ushered in by men possessing the shrewdest sense of self-interest.
 The trust has done far more for Germany than the troubadour So, too, in France the fall of the Bastile was less important than the rise of the factory
 Under the rule of the War Lords and the militant statesmen of the earth international relations of the combined powers of the world, weigh ing the profit in commerce against the cost of fleets and armies and the in- terest on the heritage of former wears are conducted only at an enormous loss
 In June, 1906, John Burns, member cf the British cabinet called atten- ton in a speech at Manchester to the fact that in the past ten years Eng land had spent $2,500 ,000 in war. He stated by way of contrast that it had taken 25,000 municipalities of the United Kingdom one hundred years to spend $2,5OO,OOO,OOO on 1000 gas works, markets, tramways and elec- tric-light undertakings
 The countries that borrow to develop industries have established an ever lasting truce with countries that lend The new covenants of peace and re- ciprocity are not on file in the depart ments of state. The vault of the mo- dern financier has come to be de- pository of more significant interna- tional secrets than the pigeonhole oi the politician.
 We do more business in one week ir the United States than our exports oi manufactures to the whole world equa in a year.
 There is nothing in all the annals oi delusion more amazing than the preva. lent fallacy in America that We have engineered a commercial invasion O. the world.