She is not unmindful in any respect of what the war may send her way.
In the breaking-away and the breaking-up of Turkey, she sees a clear
field for Egypt, the realization of the dream of Cecil Rhodes of the
development of the whole of Africa by a Cape to Cairo Railroad, and she
sees her own empire and peoples belting the world in power, usefulness,
and justice, and with a sweep and scope for enterprise and development
beyond all the previous dreams of this generation.

The United States, with hundreds of millions of banking reserves
released and giving base for a business expansion double any we have
had before, seems suddenly paralyzed in its business activities and,
comprehending only that the loaf of bread is a cent higher and a pound
of cotton a few cents lower, it is wondering on which side of its bread
the butter is to fall.

Meanwhile, it talks politics, asks if prosperity here is to come during
or after the war; and having little comprehension of the meaning of the
national throbs that on the other side of the globe are pulsating the
world into a new era of light, liberty, and expansion by individual
labor, it refuses to take up its daily home-task and go forward.

In the hope that these pages may be useful to my fellow countrymen in
giving them the facts of this war, its commercial causes, its financial
progress, its sacrifice in humanity,--sacrifice that could not be
demanded but for a greater future,--these papers are taken, as
completed in my financial publications in this month of February, and
placed before the reading community in book form, as requested in
hundreds of personal letters.

They were never conceived or written with any idea of their permanent