Pattullo is quoted as saying at the head of this article, the international financiers have been so engrossed in world money that the sense of national responsibility sometimes becomes blurred in their minds. They desire everything—war, negotiations and peace—to be conducted in such a way as to react favorably on the money market. For that is their market: money is what they buy and sell: and because money has no fixed price, it is a market which offers the widest opportunity for the trickster and swindler. One cannot play such tricks with stone or corn or metals, but with money as the commodity everything is possible.
Mr. Warburg is already very much interested about the treatment to be accorded foreign securities in the next war. Readers of the daily newspapers may recall that recently a demand was made for the gold in the Reichsbank, which was resisted on the ground that the Reichsbank, although the central bank of Germany, was really a private concern—just as Paul Warburg said it was and just as he has insisted that our own Federal Reserve System should be, and which it is. There is far-sighted wisdom in that, with a view to possible defeat in war.