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discussing the financial operations of a well ordered country the layman's order of approach may be to review the expenditures that it undertakes and their purposes, the resources from which it draws its revenues for meeting current expenses, and, finally, the debts contracted outside the course of its ordinary life and the provisions made for paying them. But in studying many of the Latin American republics the conditions seem to counsel studying the debt first and then looking to what financial resources there are from which to pay the interest and sinking fund charges and the expenses of current activities. In some cases the national debt or a portion of it dates from before national independence and has been an important factor in the national politics throughout the life of the state.

In new and undeveloped countries also the national debt takes an unusual prominence in discussions of national finance because it is regularly a foreign debt, at least in majority, and carries with it, therefore, possible complications with other powers. Often its payment will have been undertaken at a time when the national credit was so low that the capitalists were not willing to accept the state's general promise to pay but insisted