what the Holy Alliance, with its complete unity of thought and purpose, could achieve in Europe only with the help of frequent armed interventions was here accomplished on a world scale by the shadowy entity called the Concert of Europe. For an explanation of this amazing feat, we must seek for some undisclosed powerful social instrumentality at work in the new setting, which could play the role of dynasties and episcopacies under the old and make the peace interest effective. This anonymous factor was haute finance …

… Some contended that it was merely the tool of governments; others, that the governments were the instruments of its unquenchable thirst for gain; some, that it was the sower of international discord; others, that it was the vehicle of an effete cosmopolitanism sapping the strength of virile nations. None was quite mistaken. Haute finance, an institution sui generis, peculiar to the last third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century, functioned as the main link between the political and economic organization of the world in this period … While the Concert of Europe acted only at intervals, haute finance functioned as a permanent agency of the most elastic kind. Independent of single governments, even of the most powerful, it was in touch with them all; independent of the central banks, even of the Bank of England, it was closely connected with them.