That this huge problem can be solved, and solved so well that the country can go ahead to a great period of increased productivity and prosperity, I fully believe; but this can only be done if it is able to command the most efficient co-operation of all the various factors in production—­if employers put their best brains and if workers put their best energy into the business, and if everything is done to make the whole machinery work with the utmost possible smoothness.  One element in the machinery, and a highly important one, is the question of capital.  During the war the citizens of this country have been trained to save and to put their money at the disposal of the Government with a success which could hardly have been expected when the war began.  Whether they will continue to exercise the same self-denial when the war is over Is a very open question.  At any rate, there can be no doubt that there will be a tendency among a very large number of people who have answered the appeal to save money for the war to listen with considerable indifference to any appeals that may be made to them to save money in order to provide industry with capital.  All the capital that industry can get, it will certainly want.  If, besides what it can get at home, it can also get a considerable amount from foreign countries, then its ability to resume work on a prosperous and profitable basis when the war is over will be very greatly helped.  This would seem to be so obvious that one might have thought that even a Government which is believed to be flirting with what is called Tariff Reform would think twice before it imposed any restrictions on the free flow of foreign capital into British industry.  In so far as foreigners lend to us we shall be able to import raw materials, to be worked up to the profit of British industry, in return for promises to pay—­very timely convenience at a critical moment.

Nevertheless, it would appear that obviousness of the desirability of foreign capital, from whatever source it comes, is by no means evident to those who are now in charge of the nation’s destinies.  At any rate, the Company Law Amendment Committee, which was appointed last February “to inquire what amendments are expedient in the Companies Acts, 1908 to 1917, particularly having regard to circumstances arising out of the war and of the developments likely to arise on its conclusion,” seems to have thought it necessary to provide the Government with schemes by which alien capital could, if the Government thought necessary, be kept out of the country.  It was a powerful and representative Committee, and it is very satisfactory to note that its own view concerning the policy to be pursued was strongly in favour of freedom.  It points out in its Report that the question which lay in the forefront of its investigations was that of the employment of foreign capital in British industries.  On the preliminary question of whether it was desirable that foreign capital should be freely