Sooner or later, and probably in all cases before 1917, all the belligerents will be forced to adopt inconvertible paper money for their internal uses.  There will be British assignats or greenbacks.  It will seem to many financial sentimentalists almost as though Great Britain were hauling down a flag when the sovereign, which has already disappeared into bank and Treasury coffers, is locked up there and reserved for international trade.  But Great Britain has other sentiments to consider than the finer feelings of bankers and the delicacies of usury.  The pound British will come out of this war like a company out of a well-shelled trench—­attenuated.

Depreciation of the currency means, of course, a continuing rise in prices, a continuing writing off of debt.  If labour has any real grasp of its true interests it will not resent this.  It will merely insist steadfastly on a proper adjustment of its wages to the new standard.  On that point, however, it will be better to write later....

Let us see how far we have got in this guessing.  We have considered reasons that seem to point to the destruction of a great amount of old property and old debt, and the creation of a great volume of new debt before the end of the war, and we have adopted the ideas that currency will probably have depreciated more and more and prices risen right up to the very end.

There will be by that time a general habit of saving throughout the community, a habit more firmly established perhaps in the propertied than in the wages-earning class.  People will be growing accustomed to a dear and insecure world.  They will adopt a habit of caution; become desirous of saving and security.

Directly the phase of enormous war loans ends, the new class of rentiers holding the various great new national loans will find themselves drawing this collectively vast income and anxious to invest it.  They will for a time be receiving the bulk of the unearned income of the world.  Here, in the high prices representing demand and the need for some reinvestment of interest representing supply, we have two of the chief factors that are supposed to be necessary to a phase of business enterprise.  Will the economic history of the next few decades be the story of a restoration of the capitalistic system upon a new basis?  Shall we all become investors, speculators, or workers toiling our way to a new period of security, cheapness and low interest, a restoration of the park, the enclosure, the gold standard and the big automobile, with only this difference—­that the minimum wage will be somewhere about two pounds, and that a five-pound note will purchase about as much as a couple of guineas would do in 1913?

That is practically parallel with what happened in the opening half of the nineteenth century after the Napoleonic wars, and it is not an agreeable outlook for those who love the common man or the nobility of life.  But if there is any one principle sounder than another of all those that guide the amateur in prophecy, it is that history never repeats itself.  The human material in which those monetary changes and those developments of credit will occur will be entirely different from the social medium of a hundred years ago.