Europe that she has already dissipated the resources that have enabled her to levy the tribute paid for her investments in every quarter of the earth, and that neither the Germans nor their antagonists will be able for many years to go on with those projects for world exploitation which lay at the root of the great war.  Very jaded and anaemic nations will sit about the table on which the new map of Europe will be drawn....  Each of the diplomatists will come to that business with a certain pre-occupation.  Each will be thinking of his country as one thinks of a patient of doubtful patience and temper who is coming-to out of the drugged stupor of a crucial, ill-conceived, and unnecessary operation ...  Each will be thinking of Labour, wounded and perplexed, returning to the disorganised or nationalised factories from which Capital has gone a-fighting, and to which it may never return.

III.  NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION

The war has become a war of exhaustion.  One hears a great deal of the idea that “financial collapse” may bring it to an end.  A number of people seem to be convinced that a war cannot be waged without money, that soldiers must be paid, munitions must be bought; that for this money is necessary and the consent of bank depositors; so that if all the wealth of the world were nominally possessed by some one man in a little office he could stop the war by saying simply, “I will lend you no more money.”

Now, as a matter of fact, money is a power only in so far as people believe in it and Governments sustain it.  If a State is sufficiently strong and well organised, its control over the money power is unlimited.  If it can rule its people, and if it has the necessary resources of men and material within its borders, it can go on in a state of war so long as these things last, with almost any flimsy sort of substitute for money that it chooses to print.  It can enrol and use the men, and seize and work the material.  It can take over the land and cultivate it and distribute its products.  The little man in the office is only a power because the State chooses to recognise his claim.  So long as he is convenient he seems to be a power.  So soon as the State is intelligent enough and strong enough it can do without him.  It can take what it wants, and tell him to go and hang himself.  That is the melancholy ultimate of the usurer.  That is the quintessence of “finance.”  All credit is State-made, and what the State has made the State can alter or destroy.

The owner and the creditor have never had any other power to give or withhold credit than the credit that was given to them.  They exist by sufferance or superstition and not of necessity.