Such a man may have great strength of character, high moral worth, but he may be weak intellectually. He may be no scholar, no man of erudition, no man of imagination, and possess no exceptional ability. His intellectual limitations may be the cause of his poverty. But in whatever position he may be placed, according to his limited qualifications, we know that he will discharge his duties faithfully, conscientiously, to the best of his ability, and will not swerve a moment from the path of honesty and uprightness. Such a man could be no thief and could tell no lie. He lessens our anxieties. We say we can trust him as readily and as confidently as we can trust ourselves. It is a matter for thankfulness that we have such a servant in whom we can place our trust. Here, therefore, are illustrations of intellectual and moral credit which men are said to possess. Financial credit is another kind of credit. With this, perhaps, mankind is more familiar. The economic standing and welfare, as distinct from the purely moral standing, of a nation is dependent upon what we call financial credit. If I lend money to a friend it is immaterial to me what his abilities or his morals may be, so long as I know he will be in a position to repay that loan. If his moral credit be bad, he will, perhaps, not repay it if he has the means; but even if his moral credit be bad he may pay it from motives of expediency. He may want a further loan later, and it would not be to his material interests for me to propagate the fact that he will not repay his debts. His credit is worth too much to him to be placed in jeopardy of this kind. He must redeem the debt if only from the business motive of expediency. Tradesmen are said to live on credit. They declare that if they refused to grant credit to their customers they would speedily be in the bankruptcy court. By granting such credit they run grave risks. They have to trust to the honesty of their customers and to their future means. Therefore they have to face the risks of incurring losses by bad debts, phenomena inseparable from such business. On the other hand, they believe that by granting such credit and running such risks they extend their custom and compete with hopes of greater success against their rivals. What they may lose in the way of bad debts they may more than recoup in the larger profits they make on the growth of their business. It may be, from an ethical standpoint, a degrading and deplorable way of living on each other in a highly civilized community, but the fact serves the purpose of illustrating our ideas of financial credit.