254 THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE
direct or indirect, is quite as eager as the industrialist, anticipating
 active markets for his manufactures, in the preservation
of the steady volumes of loans. Railway commissioners vie with
steamship companies in viewing with alarm any falling away in
the volume of overseas trade. Thus the whole weight of the
community, despite somewhat hypocritical protests to the contrary,
 is thrown in the balance against the endeavour to retard
capital imports; and in this situation lies the most difficult of
the practical aspects of the problem.
To the operation of both the external and internal factors in
the national situation, therefore, is to be ascribed the inability
on the part of the banking authorities in Australia to impose
a greater measure of control upon the credit position. It is to
be feared that no amount of improvement in the volume and
quality of information bearing upon Australian business conditions
 would bring any measure of relief to Australian bankers
while vigorous public borrowing continues. Statistics presenting
 an accurate measure of prosperity, and better indices of
every phase of the domestic situation, would still leave them
impotent in the face of a credit situation the chief features of
which are determined on the other side of the world.
What that situation demands, even before a more cautious
borrowing policy, is a more intelligent lending policy ; and the
co-operation of the London market with well-balanced economic
opinion in Australia is required in an effort to regulate the
violent fluctuations in the stream of capital to a even flow which
will permit of its more satisfactory application to the needs of
Australian industry, and to abolish those distressing and,
we believe, avoidable reversals in business which affect the
prosperity of both countries. This, however, will not avoid the
necessity for a more efficient use of capital by both public and
private borrowers. The plain moral of this tale is that, when the
possibility of repaying debt out of the increased production
made possible by the borrowed capital no longer exists, all
sconomic justification for expansive borrowing programmes
automatically disappears.