All these things we did, and that we should have done them was evidence of economic strength and adaptability which have astonished the world.  To have financed the Allies and ourselves as long as we did would have been comparatively easy if our population could have been left at work to turn out the stuff and services, the provision of which are implied by financing; but for us to have been able to do it and at the same time to improvise an army which is now consistently and regularly beating the Germans is an achievement which will inevitably raise the world’s opinion of our economic strength, on which financial prestige is ultimately based.

But, as it has been said, in discussing this question we have to look at it all the time from the relative point of view.  How will our prestige be when the war is over, not as compared with what it was before the war, but as compared with what any other rival in any other part of the world can show?  Here we have to acknowledge at once, freely and frankly, that, as compared with New York, we shall have gone backward.

America will have been enormously enriched by the war, which we shall certainly have not.  America will have been opening up channels of international trade and international finance, and so New York will have been gaining at the expense of London.  It is certain that when the war is over America’s dependence upon London for credits against the shipments of goods to and from her shores will have been very greatly lessened, if not altogether a thing of the past.

This change would have happened any way, war or no war, but it has been greatly quickened by the war.  Before the war America was already making arrangements, under her new banking system, to promote the machinery for acceptance and discount, in order that goods sent to her from foreign countries should be financed by bills drawn on American banks and houses in dollars instead of on English banks and houses in sterling.

Apart from this development, which would have happened in any case, it remains to be seen how far New York will be in a position to act as a rival of London as the world’s financial centre.  The internal resources and potentialities of America are so enormous, and there is such a vast amount of work to be done in developing them and bringing them to full fruition, that it does not at all follow that America will yet be inclined to take the position in international trade and finance which will one day surely be hers, when she has done all the work that is waiting to be done in her own back premises.

America has a new banking and monetary system on trial which has met the difficult problems of the war with great success.  These problems, however, are not nearly as complicated and various as those which are likely to arise in time of peace.  When a nation is turning out an enormous amount of goods for which the rest of the world is prepared to pay any price, her finance is a comparatively simple business.  Even now, when America has assumed the duty of financing a large number of Allies impoverished by three years of war which have been enriching her, she is still simplifying the problem by restricting her advances to the payment for goods bought in America.