The considerations just mentioned bear more especially on capital sunk in land and its immediate connexions, or in industrial concerns. As regards public debt, the question is more involved. The laxity of public morality has here the disastrous tendency of making a party temporarily in power regard the actions of its predecessors as invalid. The temptation is certainly great. When a foreign loan has been contracted in the name of a municipality or provincial government, at the expense of the people at large, but is used purely for party or even private ends, it is at least comprehensible that an opposing party should regard the loan as an unwarrantable exploitation of the public, and should think it justifiable to allow the creditors to suffer instead of their own countrymen, who were no party to the transaction. The policy and ethics of such a view are another matter. And it is, as usual, the honest who suffer. For, if the succeeding party are possessed of higher views in the sphere of political morality, owing to the necessity of regarding their predecessors' really fraudulent contracts as binding on themselves for fulfilment, the profit goes to the malefactors, while the odium incurred in realising the money to cancel the obligation falls on the unoffending upholders of honesty. The extraordinary feature that impresses itself on the mind when looking through the history of Argentine loans is the readiness with which London financiers responded to the invitations. No more remarkable case, probably, could be found in the whole history of finance than that of the Buenos Aires Provincial Bank, its absolutely reckless mismanagement and of the inevitable collapse which followed--resulting, as everyone knows, in the failure of Messrs. Baring. This catastrophe set back Argentine progress several years, and it is only now that the recovery is at all complete.