WAR SUPPLIES

117

A Southern manufacturer received an order for 5000 dozen pairs of socks to be shipped weekly for six months. The price was under $1.00 per dozen, with ten per cent of wool in them. He complained that he was making only twenty cents per dozen profit, while if he had not been so anxious for the order, he might just as well have got a price that would have shown more than twice this profit.

In boots and shoes, England, instead of giving orders to this country, has been buying leather in America, and filling all her own factories. It is the policy of England to fill every workshop in her tight little island before she permits business to overflow.

To-day there are no unemployed in Great Britain, except in the cotton districts dependent upon German trade. Wage advances and overtime are the rule rather than the exception.

The one country that the warring world must turn to for supplies is the United States, and that in increasing measure. Orders for $300,000,000 of war goods already received must be duplicated several times.

Every American automobile manufacturer able to deliver motor-trucks in lots of one hundred, has received his orders for shipments to the Allies.

Germany has now no base from which to get many important supplies. In a long contest the Allies will supply motor-cars, shells, guns, and ammunition to a far greater extent than Germany can manufacture them. Factories for this work are expanding in both Russia and America.

The English do not speak against the Germans as a people. They believe them seriously misled by Prussian militarism, which they declare must be crushed absolutely.

Where formerly England was an open door to Germans and suspicions against German spies were laughed at, the bars are now sharply up.

Most of the golfing clubs have voted to suspend the activities of members with German antecedents.

At the clubs in Pall Mall, notices have been posted requesting members not to introduce during the war Germans or those of German descent.

Membership on the Stock Exchange is not continuous as in this country, and at the March elections in 1915 there will be a dropping out of German names.

CHAPTER XII

ENGLISH WAR FINANCE

Protecting Trade and the Trader - How German Banks Paid The English Loan England's Wealth-The Income Tax More Taxes.

A GIANT Atlas bearing the civilized world on its financial shoulders has arisen between the North and the Irish seas. That is the picture that stands at the opening of 1915, where before Germany had endeavored to stamp the label "Perfidious and degraded nation of shopkeepers."

Only the pencil of a Doré could sketch this giant and put him in figures of proper relief as, aroused from his pastime of trade and the acquisition of shillings, he summons with one hand the resources of the empire and with the other passes them out to needy warring nations, taking care all the while that the necessary dealing of exchange and commerce have the least possible disturbance.

Kitchener says

the war may last for two years, but he is making preparations for three years, and must do this job so thoroughly that no repetition will be required.

If it is war for three years, then this mighty financial Atlas of England is preparing to write its name on promises to pay more gold than all the money-gold on the surface of the earth today. And England won't hesitate to do it if necessary not for one moment.

How can she advance money to Russia, Belgium, France, and other countries at war or just going into the war, and ask no foreign assistance, no overseas help, except to be let alone, -expand her home trade and wages, pay with a lavish hand, and still pile up real gold both at home and over the ocean?

The first answer is because she does expand trade; because she does pay and pay promptly; and because she does protect her own trade.

The United States does not protect its trade or its citizens anywhere in the world to-day. It shivers in war-time, and borrows of everybody else when it has a panic of its own.

There is only one way to make trade, and that is to pay and protect. England, through centuries of fighting to protect both trade and the trader, has learned the way to the highest freedom in both trade and finance.

Therefore, before this most Audacious War was set afoot England had a very small stock

PROTECTING TRADE AND TRADER 121 of coin gold but a very large stock of gold creditbills.

For years England has held in her cash box from $1,800,000,000 to $2,500,000,000 of the commercial credits of the world. With goods and trade-honor behind these promises to pay gold, she had no need of the metal but only of command of the seas, that her gold might come in when needed. When the war broke out, $600,000,000 of these gold promises to pay were of German and Austrian origin. The big London bankers who had their names on the back of such acceptances could not in honor underwrite any more commercial bills. They knew their capital was involved in collection of those already out.

But Britain said the commerce of England must go on as well as the war. The people who held these acceptances were promptly invited to turn them into the Bank of England, which held the guaranty of Great Britain behind it, and receive the money therefor; the discount rate after maturity to have 2 per cent added thereto, 1 per cent to go to the Bank for expenses and 1 per cent to the government for reserve fund to cover any losses. Of such bills $600,000,000 were promptly discounted.