AMERICAS ADVANCE 25

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 dis-
count, in order that goods sent to her from foreign
countries should be financed by bills drawn on