We must, however, in most things take the world as we find it, and in spite of my hatred of all debts, and of my belief that debt never paid off in the long run ruins the debtor, whether individual or state, it has to be admitted that good of many kinds came out of evil in this instance. Debt, by the intermediary of the banker, begat credit; and credit, based upon a security which was reliable, the fruits of a nation’s labour and enterprise, gave an irresistible impetus to that industrial and mercantile expansion which has carried the prosperity of the United Kingdom to heights never before seen on earth, and changed the course of human progress everywhere. Imagine what might have happened if the banker’s utilitarian fiction, which treated the symbols or book entries of moneys spent in wars as so much realised wealth, capable of being utilised to call still more wealth into existence, had never been allowed to have free play. The nation would have perished beneath the dead weight of its obligations. Called upon to find the interests of the debts imposed upon it, out of resources suffering continual depletion, unstimulated by any new capital beyond what the minority might or might not have been able to furnish at the moment out of its savings, it would have sunk lower and lower in poverty, until its condition might have become one of hopeless anarchy. The banker and the stock-jobber between them saved England from that fate—unconsciously, perhaps, but they none the less saved it. Their operations often exhibited a kind of inverted, topsy-turvy communism. Gravely treating the promises to pay emitted by governments of all degrees of irresponsibility as the inviolable obligations of the people at large, they used these promises and symbols of wealth already dissipated as the bases on which to rest further credits granted to joint-stock enterprises—to South Sea bubbles no doubt, but also to East India companies, Hudson Bay companies, mining companies, canal companies, adventures of all kinds, some of which outlived the manias amid which they came into existence, and survive in one form or another to this hour. Throughout modern history, the part played by debt in engendering credit, in calling capital into existence as it were out of nothing, and providing the means to carry out great undertakings by whose completion alone could the credit-born capital become living and real, has been such as to transform the world, girdle and seam it with railways, bind it together by electric cables, and cover its oceans with ships almost as sure and safe in their comings and goings as a suburban railway train. In ways almost infinite, credit was created to represent assets not yet in being; and, by putting in pawn of previously existing debts, and through the intermediary of banks, it drew out hoards from the keeping of the thrifty. Dead capital—capital spent—came to life again as it were, and was a potent agent for the advancement of mankind in civilisation.