Europeans view the religiously committed as substitutes or surrogates in practicing the religion that they generally favor but do not want, for whatever reason, to practice themselves. They do not want to be personally involved in the church but want it to be there in time of need (usually associated with death and dying) or as an institution of moral continuity in the society. … Americans who don’t go to church regularly claim that they do. They think they should. For most Americans, it is the normal and approved thing to do. People are sometimes better understood by what they think they should do than by what they do … Indeed, belonging to a church is a mark of public acceptability, as is evident in numerous studies showing how immigrants quickly become more religiously affiliated in America than they were in their home country. … Fifty years ago it was thought to be a question of great public moment when an Episcopal bishop such as James Pike publicly denied the existence of hell, heaven [, virgin birth and the Trinity]. … [P]eople who themselves had little interest in heaven, hell, or God felt themselves betrayed when it failed to do its vicarious duty in upholding what Christians are supposed to believe. Establishment Protestantism was failing to do its duty … that worried people who expected the churches to do their believing for them. There are undoubtedly many non–Catholics, and also lapsed Catholics—or, as some cleverly say, “collapsed Catholics”—who would be greatly disturbed if the Church failed to keep up the side by continuing to teach what they are not sure they believe, or are sure they do not believe.
— Richard J. Neuhaus, Secularizations
[I]n the period from 1925 to 1928, the Swedish match syndicate Svenska Tandsticks Aktiebolaget bought up four of the five match factories in Latvia. In 1928, Latvia signed an agreement with the Swedish match syndicate, which provided for the syndication of the Latvian match industry and the granting of an external loan to Latvia of 6 million US dollars.
— Viesturs P. Karnups, Latvian Foreign Trade with the Scandinavian Countries 1920–1940
Latvia employed her six–million–dollar loan for the purchase of seed–grain from abroad, for road building, land reclamation, loans to municipalities and landowners, and for railway construction. [In 1929, the year of Wall Street Crash.]
[Kreuger's] loan of six million dollars to Latvia antagonized the Moguls not only of New York, but of London as well. The City of Riga, jumping–off place for investigators of socialism and habitation of those newspaper correspondents whose papers will not allow them to tread upon Soviet soil, had been unethical enough to default on a loan. The Government of Latvia had assumed the blase attitude that Riga meant nothing to it and that Riga's obligations were most decidedly Riga's, not those of Latvia. The bankers were aroused. London financiers formally decided over their whisky–and–sodas that Latvia was no fit place for a gentleman's money and they asked New York bankers if they too would not, at least for technical purposes, also become gentlemen. The result was that Latvia became as completely blackballed by big–time finance as a freshman with high–water pants and a red necktie. Then along came the all–forgiving gentleman from Stockholm with those six million dollars. "Finance" never overlooked that transgression. After that Kreuger was most emphatically a lone wolf in the financial world, fair game for any one who was big and daring enough to tackle him.
[Loan] allowed the little Baltic country to laugh at the boycott which London and New York bankers had placed on her.
— William H. Stoneman, The life and death of Ivar Kreuger (1932)
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