not only during the war but also before it, both from a financial and industrial point of view.  It gave us control of the foreign exchanges by enabling us, at any time, to turn the balance of trade in our favour by ceasing for a time to lend money abroad, and calling upon foreign countries to pay us the interest due from them.  The financial connections which it implied were of the greatest possible assistance to us in enhancing British prestige, and so helping our industry and commerce to push the wares that they produced and handled.

Reform of the Companies Acts has often before the war been a more or less burning question.  Whenever the public thought that it had been swindled by the company promoting machinery, it used to write letters to the newspapers and point out that it was a scandal that the sharks of the City should be allowed to prey upon the ignorant public, and that something ought to be done by Parliament to insure that investments offered to the public should somehow or other be made absolutely watertight and safe, while by some unexplained method the public would still be somehow able to derive large benefits from fortunate speculations in enterprises which turned out right.  Every one must admit there have been some black pages in the history of British company promoting, and that many swindles have been perpetrated by which the public has lost its money and dishonest and third-rate promoters have retired with the spoil.  The question is, however, what is the remedy for this admitted and glaring evil?  Is it to be found by making the Companies Laws so strict that no respectable citizen would venture to become a director owing to the fear of penal servitude if the company on whose board he sat did not happen to pay a dividend, and that no prospectus could be issued except in the case of a concern which had already stood so severe a test that its earning capacity was placed beyond doubt?  It would certainly be possible by legislative enactment to make any security that was offered as safe as Consols, and less subject to fluctuation in value.  But when this had been done the effect would be very much like the effect upon rabbits of the recent fixing of their price.  No more securities would be offered.

It is certainly extremely important for the future financial and industrial development of this country that the machinery of finance and company promotion should be made as clean as possible.  What we want to do is to make everybody see that a great increase in output is required, that this great increase in output can only be brought about if there is a great increase in the available amount of capital, that capital can only be brought into being by being saved, and that it is therefore everybody’s business, both for his own sake and that of the country, to earn as much as he can and save as much as he can so that the country’s capital fund can be increased; so that industry, which will have many difficult problems