Englishmen are always supposed to be particularly insular.  Nevertheless, any one who looks at the Official List daily published by the London Stock Exchange and sees the enormous number of Government and municipal loans from all parts of the world, the number of foreign railways, and the number of foreign enterprises of all kinds which are dealt in on the London Stock Exchange, cannot avoid the conclusion that this practice of investing money abroad, which has been followed here to a greater extent than in any other country, must have very greatly widened the Englishman’s horizon and forced him to confess that at least from one point of view dwellers in foreign countries have some right to exist.  At any rate, in practice English investors not only have shown that they do not recognize international barriers, but there have even been times when foreign securities have actually been preferred to English.  A few years ago it was reported by stockbrokers that many of their clients would not invest money at home and insisted whenever possible that it should be placed abroad.  To such an extent has this process been carried on that it is now calculated by statisticians that no less than four thousand millions of English money have been placed outside England, about one-half of this having been lent to foreign countries, and about one-half to our own colonies.  Here again, as in commerce, there arises a possibility of quarrelling, not only between the lender and borrower but also between rival groups of lenders in different countries.  When an economically backward country is being developed with the assistance of capital from nations which are at a further stage of economic progress, the moneylender is supposed to acquire a certain amount of political prestige and privilege which makes other nations, which have an eye to increasing their influence in the borrowing country, jealous concerning such operations.  A curious example was presented not long ago by China.  China wanted to borrow, and probably the only countries which had any genuine surplus of capital available for export were England and France.  Nevertheless, owing to the political side issues involved, Russia, Germany, and the United States also all insisted on taking part in the business of lending money to China.  China was compelled to borrow more money than it wanted, so that all these so-called civilized Powers could share in the operation, and the absurdity of the position was increased by the fact that some at least of the Powers which lent the money would have had to borrow it somewhere before they could do so.