essential to the conduct of the administration in accordance with its idea of the services which that administration ought to render to the inhabitants.
Whether Governments should raise debts at all is a question that might very easily be argued were it not that they have so long and so vigorously done so that the argument would be futile. They do so in order to carry on war, to finance public services such as transport systems, and to make good a gap between revenue and ordinary expenditure. In the bad old past, loans have been much too freely granted by the lending centres, especially London and Paris, to irresponsible Governments without sufficient inquiry as to how the money was to be spent, or even as to how much of it was ever going to reach the Treasury of the borrower, after all the cormorants on both sides of the water had been satisfied, who thought that they had claims to pickings out of the transaction. The consequence has been a series of defaults for which the citizens of the defaulting country have little real responsibility, and a very ugly blot on the history of International Finance, in its first century. Such things could hardly happen again, and in the present dearth of capital for investment there is no need to fear that weak borrowers
