In the Merchant of Venice we find Antonio trading with all the countries of the then known world,

    From Tripolis, from Mexico, and England,
    From Lisbon, Barbary, and India,

but we do not find that Shylock was lending money on at all the same international scale.  When communication was slow, difficult, and untrustworthy, money-lending at a distance was made very risky, because it was impossible for the lender to keep the watchful eye on the borrower’s operations and credit that is required if he is to feel comfortable in his venture.  For a Lombard Street banker to lend money to a merchant in Cheapside payable at a year hence was, until comparatively lately, a much safer enterprise than to lend it to a merchant in Paris, because the local borrower was always under the lender’s observation.  If he were overtrading or living on too lavish a scale it would at once be noticed and reported.

Nevertheless, international finance made steady progress through somewhat obscure beginnings.  We know that Philip II of Spain was heavily indebted to moneylenders all over the Continent, and that by his famous repudiation he carried consternation throughout Europe.[28] Edward III was also heavily indebted to Florentine bankers, and he also omitted to pay his debt; and it is said that the descendants of the Florentine bankers still have a claim against the English Crown in consequence[29]; but it was not until after the creation of stock exchanges and the machinery of a public market in securities that international finance became a question of general importance.

Here also the effect has been for unity combined with a good deal of disunion.  Twenty years ago it used to be said that feeling in the Western States of America was very strongly anti-English because most of the Western farmers were indebted to English moneylenders, and on the whole it may be said that the relations between the borrower and lender are not likely to be so friendly and so likely to promote unity as those between buyer and seller.  There is really no logical reason why this should be so:  the basis of the bargain between the two is exactly the same.  In commercial transactions one man sells to another because the other man wants something that he has got more than he does.  It is exactly the same with the borrower and lender of money.  A man borrows because he wants money and is prepared to pay a rate of interest for it.  The lender lends because he has money to lend and wants to earn interest on it.  Nevertheless there is something in this relationship which seems to produce discord.  It is not many years since the Australian newspapers used to talk of England as John Bull Cohen, implying that the English money market made more than it ought to do by developing, with the help of its financial resources, the production and commerce of the young countries of the world.  Perhaps it is human to feel a grudge against a creditor, because the money has to be paid back, whereas a commercial bargain is done with.  Nevertheless, after allowing for all the friction that money-lending seems to produce, there can be no question that the establishment of the international market in securities has enormously widened the world’s output of commodities, and it has greatly promoted that unity of interests which has brought mankind together more than anything else.