While we may admit advances and gains in certain isolated directions, the extra burden is felt in all directions of commerce and industry.  And that extra burden is visible through finance—­the increased cost of money, the scarcity of capital, the lower negotiability of securities, the greater uncertainty concerning the future.  It is by means of the financial reaction that America, as a whole, has felt the adverse effects of this war.  There is not a considerable village, much less a considerable city, not a merchant, not a captain of industry in the United States that has not so felt it.  It is plainly evident that by the progressive dearness of money, the lower standard of living that will result in Europe, the effect on immigration, and other processes which I will touch upon at greater length later, any temporary stimulus which a trade here and there may receive will be more than offset by the difficulties due to financial as apart from industrial or commercial reactions.

This war will come near to depriving America for a decade or two of its normal share of the accumulated capital of the older peoples, whether that capital be used in paying war indemnities or in paying off the cost of the war or in repairing its ravages.  In all cases it will make capital much dearer, and many enterprises which with more abundant capital might have been born and might have stimulated American industry will not be born.  For the best part of a generation perhaps the available capital of Europe will be used to repair the ravages of war there, to pay off the debts created by war, and to start life normally once more.  We shall suffer in two ways.

In a recent report issued by the Agricultural Department at Washington is a paragraph to the effect that one of the main factors which have operated against the development of the American farm is the difficulty that the farmer has found in securing abundant capital and the high price that he has to pay for it when he can secure it.  It will in the future be of still higher price, and still less abundant, because, of course, the capital of the world is a common reservoir—­if it is dearer in one part, it is dearer to some extent in all parts.

So that if for many years the American farmhouse is not so well built as it might be, the farm not so well worked, rural life in America not so attractive as it might be, the farmer’s wife burdened with a little more labor than she might otherwise have, and if she grows old earlier than she might otherwise, it will be in part because we are paying our share of the war indemnities and the war costs.

But this scarcity of capital operates in another way.  One of the most promising fields for American enterprise is, of course, in the undeveloped lands to the south of us, but in the development of those lands we have looked and must look for the co-operation of European capital.  Millions of French and British money have poured into South America, building docks and railroads and opening up the country, and that development of South America has been to our advantage because quite frequently these enterprises were under the actual management of Americans, using to the common advantage the savings of the thrifty Frenchman and the capital of the wealthy Englishman.