September 28, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
LAND & WATER 
EMPIRE HOUSE, KINGSWAY, LONDON, W.C 
Telephone: HOLBORN 2828 
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28. I9I6 
CONTENTS 
PAGE 
Joan of Arc and St. George. By Louis Raemaekers i 
A British Trade Bank. (Leader) 
Strategy of the Balkans. By Hilaire Belloc 
Enemy Activities. By Arthur Pollen 
Rural France. By Sir Herbert Matthews 
The Bay. By J. D. Symon 
Germans in East Africa. By J. A. Jordan 
Establishment of Poland. (With Map) 
The Kaiser and his People. By Francis Gribble 
Nevinson and his War Pictures. By C. Lewis Hind 
Photographs of Mr. Nevinson's Pictures 
Greenmantle. By John Buchan 
Union Jack Club Fund 
The West End 
Kit and Equipment 
5 
4 
10 
12 
14 
15 
i6 
17 
18 
19 
20 
24 
26 
XV. 
A BRITISH TRADE BANK 
THIS summer, on July ist, the Board of Trade 
appointed a Committee under the chairmanship 
of Lord Faringdon, " to consider the best means 
of meeting the needs of British firms after the 
war as regards financial facilities for trade, particularly 
with reference to financing large overseas contracts." 
The Committee had also to prepare a detailed scheme. 
Within less than three months the work is done. The 
report is issued ; the detailed scheme includes the con- 
stitution of a " British Trade Bank " under Royal 
Charter, with a capital of ten millions sterling. It is 
to have a Foreign Exchange Department, a Credit De- 
partment, and a Special Information Bureau. And the 
Committee is strongly of the opinion that the Bank 
should be formed without delay, so that all preliminaries 
may be completed before the peace. 
The first impression that a perusal of this report 
creates is that the country at last realises that trade and 
commerce are as much part of Imperial defence as stand- 
ing armies or fleets in being. Germany has taught us 
this truth. She, grasped the raw fact that a nation can- 
not confine its varied activities in water-tight compart- 
ments, that to maintain health, vigour and independ- 
ence, it must live its life whole, and in the rivalries of 
peace be as efficient, aggressive and well-equipped as in 
the hostilities of war. Now that our eyes are opened, 
there can be no going back to the old methods, though 
those who advocate them still exist, and would, if they 
had their way, compel us to revert to a trade policy that 
brought the Empire to the very edge of the abyss. The 
reasons given in this report (which by the way only costs 
one penny and can be ordered through any bookseller) 
for the institution of this Bank are condemnatory of our 
former lack of system and the careless and slack manner 
in which we allowed our then Teuton " friends " to 
drive us out of one market after another, while the energy 
and intellectual strength which should have enabled us 
more than to hold our own were dissipated in tedious 
and futile argument and discussion about barren ques- 
tions like Free Trade and Protection. We had divorced 
trade and commerce from the realities of national exist- 
ence and were content to live in a maze of illusion till the 
hurric ane burst and discovered the peril. 
Such a great and far-reaching institution as this British 
Trade Bank is bound to be strongly criticised in many of 
its details, especially by those who are nervous lest its 
operations may interfere with their existing businesses. 
The Committee ha\-e anticipated these fears and en- 
deavour to allay them. Before the attacks begin and 
while it is still possible to write impersonally, we warn 
all whom it may concern to be on tlieir guard against 
German influence to discredit and undermine this admir- 
able scheme. Such influence is still active in the com- 
mercial world, and it is contrary to the nature of the Hun 
to permit so vital an onslaught to be made on a valuable 
stronghold without fighting against it with all the weapons 
in his power. In these pages have been revealed from 
time to time and by different authoritative writers what 
German trade methods have been in the past ; their 
success been great, wherefore we may be certain they will 
still be employed wherever possible with all the secrecy 
and cunning which are a second nature to a people 
who have been our relentless rivals for o\-cr a quarter 
of a century though only our open enemies for' less than 
thirty months. 
It is impossible for any sane person to believe that 
coincidence is responsible for so many men of German 
birth or origin having adopted the British Consular Service 
as a career, in view of the open fact that the German 
Government had under its control a perfect network of 
spies in every country of the world. So Lord Faring- 
don's Committee do right to insist on the importance 
of a well-equipped up-to-date and independent 
Information Department or Bureau, staffed by com- 
petent men who by personal visits shall gain a knowledge 
of affairs in the countries with which the Bank may do 
business. Three years ago an obvious objection to such 
a Bureau would have been the. difficulty of finding men 
of British birth with the necessary qualifications, but 
one of the reactions of war is that trade problems are 
proving an attraction to some of the cleverest and most 
scholarly brains in the country. A British Trade 
Bank established by Royal Charter, ought once and for 
all to wipe out the old stigma attaching to trade, and in 
the future it will be recognised that a man can render 
as high service to his country in trade and commerce 
as in any other profession. It is a curious paradox that 
trade should have bden for so many generations looked 
down upon by the British, seeing that the foundations of 
the British Empire were laid and built by trade. 
It has been shrewdly remarked by a clever writer 
that " a German collects facts as industriously as a 
beaver builds a dam, but is incapable of forming judg- 
ments ; he can remember names and figures but he cannot 
see tendencies." Throughout his world trade policy 
these contradictory qualities have been manifest. We 
are learning from the German the system of collecting 
facts without losing our innate power of judgment, or 
to put it in another way, we are determined to protect and 
to push our trade henceforth as vigorously as Germany 
has done but on sound business principles, one of which 
is honesty. Competent authorities have asserted that 
but for the war it was only a matter of time for Germany 
to become bankrupt on the lines she was running her 
overseas business, but we now know it was for the \-ery 
purposes of waging war that these methods were em- 
ployed. The personnel of Lord Faringdon's Committee 
and the " detailed scheme " it has prepared are a guaran- 
tee that this country is not to be launched into any reck- 
less emulation of German commercial systems. What 
is good in them we shall accept, not because it is of 
German origin, but because it has stood the test of 
practice. This report 'promises to become an historical 
document, for the charter which founds the British Trade 
Bank should call into existence a new and modem 
system'of world-wide British commerce. That this has 
long been needed was patent to all practical men of 
experience ; now at last it arrives. 
