It is interesting to note that the result of the present war is likely, if anything, to check the export of capital for a time, not only owing to the very obvious reason that for the present all our available capital is going into the war and for some time to come will have to go into expenses connected with the war, but also because this war has set a new precedent with regard to the duty of belligerents in the matter of making payments to one another. In olden times, when war was a gentlemanly business, trade and finance were very little interrupted by it. At the time of the Crimean War the Russian Government punctually paid the interest due on Russian loans to English holders and thereby established a prestige amongst English investors which was cherished for several decades. Now that nations have taken to going to war with tooth and nail, throwing their whole available population into the field and using every possible device, military, commercial, and financial, to beat their enemies, any such pleasant decencies as paying money due from one country to another in the shape of interest or otherwise have been abandoned. When the war is over it is possible that investors will remember this fact to a certain extent and will be more chary than they were before of investing their money abroad, at any rate in any country with which there is the remotest possibility of our being involved in war. War has also shown the great inconvenience that arises when the mutual dependence of nations one on another for certain products leaves them crippled because international exchange is interrupted. International trade and finance, in their full and free development, have been shown to depend on the assumption that peace is secure. Unless the present war should be so ended as to secure peace for all time, it seems likely that all nations will aim at being able to rely, at least for the essentials of life and of defence, on home production or on a supply from countries with which war may be regarded as impossible. If this be so, then unity through trade and finance will be less universal, but more close-knit in its narrower scope. BOOKS FOR REFERENCE A.L. Bowley, _England's Foreign Trade_. Swan Sonnenschein. C.K. Hobson, _The Export of Capital_. Constable. W.S. Jevons, _Money and the Mechanism of Exchange_. Kegan Paul, Trench, Truebner & Co. Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, chs. i-iv. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 24: _Wealth of Nations_, Bk. I, ch. ii.] [Footnote 25: 1 Kings ix.] [Footnote 26: Rawlinson's translation.] [Footnote 27: Jevons, _Money as Mechanism of Exchange_, p. 1.] [Footnote 28: Motley, _United Netherlands_, ch. xxxiii.] [Footnote 29: Thorold Rogers, _Economic Interpretation of History_, ch. xx.] [Footnote 30: _England's Foreign Trade in the Nineteenth Century_, by A.L. Bowley.] X INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION