But if that old usurer’s age is over, the young usurer’s age may be coming.  To meet such enormous demands as this war is making there are three chief courses open to the modern State.

The first is to take—­to get men by conscription and material by requisition.  The British Government takes more modestly than any other in the world; its tradition from Magna Charta onward, the legal training of most of its members, all make towards a reverence for private ownership and private claims, as opposed to the claims of State and commonweal, unequalled in the world’s history.

The next course of a nation in need is to tax and pay for what it wants, which is a fractional and more evenly distributed method of taking.  Both of these methods raise prices, the second most so, and so facilitate the automatic release of the future from the boarding of the past.  So far all the belligerent Governments have taxed on the timid side.

Finally there is the loan.  This mortgages the future to the present necessity, and it has so far been the predominant source of war credits.  It is the method that produces least immediate friction in the State; it employs all the savings of surplus income that the unrest of civil enterprise leaves idle; it has an effect of creating property by a process that destroys the substance of the community.  In Germany an enormous bulk of property has been mortgaged to supply the subscriptions to the war loans, and those holdings have again been hypothecated to subscribe to subsequent loans.  The Pledged Allies with longer stockings have not yet got to this pitch of overlapping.  But everywhere in Europe what is happening is a great transformation of the property owner into a rentier, and the passing of realty into the hands of the State.

At the end of the war Great Britain will probably find herself with a national debt so great that she will be committed to the payment of an annual interest greater in figures than the entire national expenditure before the war.  As an optimistic lady put it the other day:  “All the people who aren’t killed will be living quite comfortably on War Loan for the rest of their lives.”

But part, at least, of the bulk of this wealth will be imaginary rather than real because of the rise in prices, in wages, in rent, and in taxation.  Most of us who are buying the British and French War Loans have no illusions on that score; we know we are buying an income of diminishing purchasing power.  Yet it would be a poor creature in these days when there is scarcely a possible young man in one’s circle who has not quite freely and cheerfully staked his life, who was not prepared to consider his investments as being also to an undefined extent a national subscription.

A rise in prices is not, however, the only process that will check the appearance of a new rich usurer class after the war.  There is something else ahead that has happened already in Germany, that is quietly coming about among the Allies, and that is the cessation of gold payments.  In Great Britain, of course, the pound note is still convertible into a golden sovereign; but Great Britain will not get through the war on those terms.  There comes a point in the stress upon a Government when it must depart from the austerer line of financial rectitude—­and tamper in some way with currency.