Note 288 — CHAPTER NINE. The Cross, the Cannon, and the Cash-Register.

It is mildly encouraging to reflect that very heavy and very general international investments in national and industrial bonds would have at least some tendency to dampen the bond-buying capitalists’ enthusiasm for war; because, in some cases, a disastrous war might result in the repudiation of bonds and, in most cases, might easily result in a great temporary reduction of dividends from industrial investments. Another thing to be noted here is that sometimes the investors in the bonds of an unstable nation about to go to war, may regret the threatening war and urge against it and even decline to buy war bonds, before the war is declared, in order to protect their investments already made. But after the war is once entered upon these same regretful investors feel almost compelled to purchase the new issue of war-bonds in order to make victory more certain for the nation whose bonds they already hold, and thus protect the market value of their original investments. French investors in Russian bonds and enterprises to the extent of more than a billion dollars found themselves in this predicament in the case of the recent Russian-Japanese war. See Index: “Bankruptcy, Danger of.”