“Your grandfather isn't thinking about anything else very much.”
Robbie was sending home long reports, mostly without a gleam of hope. There were plenty of people who wanted to go on fighting, but where were they to get the money? Who would want to finance new wars? And, anyhow, the fighting would be done with munitions already manufactured. There were mountains of it piled up all over France, and on the Italian front, and the Balkan front, and the Palestine front — everywhere you looked on the map. It could be bought for almost anything you wanted to offer.
“I've been trying to interest Father in buying some as a speculation,” added Robbie. “But he says we're not going into the junk business. I can't very well do it myself while I'm the European sales agent of our firm.”
In Lanny's mind was a vision of that depressing old Colonial house in Newcastle, with a worried and overworked businessman sitting at a desk piled high with papers — and having in one drawer a bundle of pamphlets setting forth the Confession of Faith of his grandfather. “What does he expect to do, Robbie?”
“We've got to figure out ways to turn some of the plants to peacetime uses. And that's going to cost a lot of money.”
“Well, we made it, didn't we?”
“Most of it was distributed as dividends, and people aren't going to put it back in unless we can show them new ways of making profits.”
“Surely, Robbie, there's going to be a demand for every sort of goods! People are clamoring for them all over.”
“It doesn't matter how much they clamor, unless they've got money. The ones that have money daren't risk it when there's so much uncertainty — and when those in authority can't make up their minds about anything. We've got a President who spent his time studying Latin and Greek and theology when he ought to have been learning the elements of finance and credit.”
Robbie said that Clemenceau and Lloyd George were every bit as ignorant about economic questions; he wanted businessmen and financiers called in to advise. With one-third of Europe in revolution, and another third hanging on the brink; with tens of millions of people not knowing where to get their next day's bread; with trade disorganized, railways broken down, river transport sunk, harbors blockaded, and millions of men still kept out of production, liable to revolt and go home, or to start shooting one another — the man to whom they all looked for guidance had brought a shipload of specialists in geography and history and international law, and only a handful who knew finance, production, or trade.