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Chaucer puts his curse on Hebrew cruelty into the mouth of the soft-hearted prioress, who wept when she saw a mouse in a trap; and it was when Edward, breaking the rule by which the rulers had hitherto fostered their bankers' wealth, flung the alien financiers out of the land, that his people probably saw him most plainly at once as a knight errant and a tender father of his people.

And if, as the Allies would doubtless say, there was really no need for any such panic, the situation was obviously sufficiently grave to be easily made use of by a military class for its own ends, or by an armaments ring or a clique of financiers for theirs.

The whole tendency of the modern world is scientific and financial, and the world is ruled by financiers and led by a financial society which honours neither art nor literature, but looks upon both as amusements which it can afford to buy, and which it is fashionable to cultivate, but which must never for a moment be considered as equal in importance to the pursuit of money for its own sake.

Great financiers contributed generously to a School of Economics that had been founded with moneys left to the Fabian Society by earlier enthusiasts for socialist propaganda and education. It remained for Mr.

The Germans being astute financiers, and aware that the war to which their policy was leading would soon break out, had made due preparations, with a surprising grasp of detail. Nothing was forgotten and nothing neglected. And success rewarded their efforts. The result was that they mobilized their finances long before they had begun to mobilize their troops.

This state of affairs developed distinctive physiognomies in the different classes of the middle-class society: thus, "the wives of the financiers are dignified, stern, severe; those of the merchants are seductive, active, gossiping, and alert; those of the artists are free, easy, and independent, with a strong taste for pleasure and gayetyand they give the tone."

They were secretly convinced that all the other private cabins, inhabited by titled persons and by financiers, were superior to their cabin, and that the captain of the steamer had fobbed them off with an imitation of a real cabin.

But in the natural course of events the financiers had to follow the merchants, and at the end of the century the decadence of Bruges as a great seaport was almost as complete as that of Ypres as an industrial centre. It was characteristic of the new trade conditions that no "halles" were built in Antwerp, the mediæval emporium being replaced by a modern exchange.

The highly-placed Jew-baiters of St. Petersburg were filled with rage, The Novoye Vremya emptied its invectives upon the Zhydovski financiers, referring to the refusal of Alphonse de Rothschild to participate in the Russian loan. Nevertheless, the Government found itself compelled to stem the tide of oppression for a short while.

No one, it seemed, cared to risk even a semblance of rivalry with that monstrous aggregation of capital, for the interlacing of financial interests was amazingly intricate, and financiers were fearful of the least misstep. Everywhere O'Neil encountered the same disheartening timidity. His battle, it seemed, had been lost before it was begun.