It is the habit of overlooking this little flaw in the imperatives of ownership that enables people to say that this war cannot go on beyond such and such a date—­the end of 1916 is much in favour just now—­because we cannot pay for it.  It would be about as reasonable to expect a battle to end because a landlord had ordered the soldiers off his estate.  So long as there are men to fight and stuff to fight with the war can go on.  There is bankruptcy, but the bankruptcy of States is not like the bankruptcy of individuals.  There is no such thing among States as an undischarged bankrupt who is forbidden to carry on.  A State may keep on going bankrupt indefinitely and still carry on.  It will be the next step in our prophetic exercise to examine the differences between State bankruptcy and the bankruptcy of a subject of the State.

The belligerent Powers are approaching a phase when they will no longer be paying anything like twenty shillings in the pound.  In a very definite sense they are not paying twenty shillings in the pound now.  That is not going to stop the war, but it involves a string of consequences and possibilities of the utmost importance to our problem of what is coming when the war is over.

The exhaustion that will bring this war to its end at last is a process of destruction of men and material.  The process of bankruptcy that is also going on is nothing of the sort.  Bankruptcy destroys no concrete thing; it merely writes off a debt; it destroys a financial but not an economic reality.  It is, in itself, a mental, not a physical fact.  “A” owes “B” a debt; he goes bankrupt and pays a dividend, a fraction of his debt, and gets his discharge.  “B’s” feelings, as we novelists used to say, are “better imagined than described”; he does his best to satisfy himself that “A” can pay no more, and then “A” and “B” both go about their business again.

In England, if “A” is a sufficiently poor man not to be formidable, and has gone bankrupt on a small scale, he gets squeezed ferociously to extract the last farthing from him; he may find himself in jail and his home utterly smashed up.  If he is a richer man, and has failed on a larger scale, our law is more sympathetic, and he gets off much more easily.  Often his creditors find it advisable to arrange with him so that he will still carry on with his bankrupt concern.  They find it is better to allow him to carry on than to smash him up.

There are countless men in the world living very comfortably indeed, and running businesses that were once their own property for their creditors.  There are still more who have written off princely debts and do not seem to be a “ha’p’orth the worse.”  And their creditors have found a balm in time and philosophy.  Bankruptcy is only painful and destructive to small people and helpless people; but then for them everything is painful and destructive; it can be a very light matter to big people; it may be almost painless to a State.