"What system?" said I.
The bank director adjusted his eye-glasses and, with round eyes, gazed at me for a while. Then, with that burst of candor which so often surprises us in the Russians, he began:
"We are not children, after all, and neither you nor I is dancing to the government music to which others are keeping time. We may, therefore, talk it over calmly. Well, we have a great drum, with which there can be no marching out of line. It drums. We have never as yet stopped our payments, like France, Austria, or Turkey. We are, therefore, punctual payers, hence we shall again secure money."
"Is this a serious argument?" I asked.
"God forbid!" was the answer. "We have paid to secure future credit. But it seems that this policy of honest debtor is wiser than the occasional discontinuance of payment, which allows some advance but involves the loss of credit. We can always repeat to the public that wishes to buy our bonds, 'Russia is honest; Russia pays; you need have no fear here of shrinkage.' And so the public buys."
"But the banker must know that the liberality is not real," I rejoined.
"And if he does know it? Is it the banker's business to initiate the public into the secret sciences? Do not forget that no government pays to the world such commissions for loans as we do. Prussia pays one-half per cent., Austria one and a half per cent., we pay three per cent.; and, confidentially, it does not end with that, but the issuing banks also get their six per cent., especially when they appear reluctant at first. For what reason should a commission of three to six per cent. be paid where the business is as bad as it is? It was Offenheim who said, 'You don't build railroads by moral maxims.' And high finance says that dividends and bonuses are not paid with moral maxims."
"According to my perhaps unbusiness-like opinion, this is not much better than stealing."
"Very unbusiness-like, indeed, my friend. The banking world needs no Nietzsche to stand on the other side of good and evil. Ethics, like religion, is only for the masses. Just calculate what a commission of three to six per cent. means on a loan of five hundred to a thousand million rubles that we shall surely need in this war. Let us say only three per cent., officially. That means thirty millions—more than sixty million marks. Do you then think that the banks belong to the Salvation Army, to imagine that they should renounce such a transaction?"