"God forbid!" was the answer. "We have paid to secure future credit. But it seems that this policy of honest debtor is wiser than the occasional discontinuance of payment, which allows some advance but involves the loss of credit. We can always repeat to the public that wishes to buy our bonds, 'Russia is honest; Russia pays; you need have no fear here of shrinkage.' And so the public buys." "But the banker must know that the liberality is not real," I rejoined. "And if he does know it? Is it the banker's business to initiate the public into the secret sciences? Do not forget that no government pays to the world such commissions for loans as we do. Prussia pays one-half per cent., Austria one and a half per cent., we pay three per cent.; and, confidentially, it does not end with that, but the issuing banks also get their six per cent., especially when they appear reluctant at first. For what reason should a commission of three to six per cent. be paid where the business is as bad as it is? It was Offenheim who said, 'You don't build railroads by moral maxims.' And high finance says that dividends and bonuses are not paid with moral maxims." "According to my perhaps unbusiness-like opinion, this is not much better than stealing." "Very unbusiness-like, indeed, my friend. The banking world needs no Nietzsche to stand on the other side of good and evil. Ethics, like religion, is only for the masses. Just calculate what a commission of three to six per cent. means on a loan of five hundred to a thousand million rubles that we shall surely need in this war. Let us say only three per cent., officially. That means thirty millions--more than sixty million marks. Do you then think that the banks belong to the Salvation Army, to imagine that they should renounce such a transaction?" "Slowly, slowly. You said at first that Russia will need in this war about a milliard rubles. That would be contrary to what I have heard from other very reliable sources--namely, that the cash reserve is supposedly equal to about a milliard rubles." "I will bet you that in three months we shall not have left a single kopek of this milliard, assuming that it exists. In agreement with military experts, who, between ourselves, are not at all optimistic, I estimate the duration of this war at twelve to eighteen months at least. With our management, every month costs us at least a hundred million rubles. Thus you see that a milliard will not be sufficient." "Well, let us say that the banks cannot reject the business, still they must, in the first place, dispose of the securities, which will not be so easy, since the French are thoroughly satiated with the bonds, and, as the fall in the rate of exchange has recently shown, confidence in these bonds is no longer any too great."