But if delusions of this kind may be fairly excused in the man in the street, they do not seem to be any excuse for those who are responsible for our finance for their total lack of a thought-out scheme at the beginning of the war, and their total failure to produce one as the war went on.  We have financed the war by haphazard methods, limping along the line of least resistance.  We are continuing to do so, and we may do so to the end, though there are now growing signs of an impatience both among the property-owning classes and others of the system by which we are financing the war by piling up debt and manufacturing banking credits.

The objections to the policy on the part of the “haves” and the “have nots” are, of course, different, but as they both converge to the same point, namely, to the reform of our system of war finance, it is possible that they may in time have the effect of shaking even the confidence of our politicians and officials in the haphazard and slipshod methods which would long ago have produced financial disaster if it had not been for the great financial strength of the country.

Finance is an enormously important weapon in the hands of our rulers for gliding the economic activities of the people.  This is so even in peace time to a certain extent, though the revenue then collected is so small an item in the total national income that it counts for much less than in war, when the power that the Government can wield by its policy in taxation and borrowing might have been all-powerful in keeping the nation on the right lines in the matter of spending and keeping down the cost of the war, and in maintaining our financial staying power to a far greater extent than has actually been done.

It is easy, as they say on the Stock Exchange, to job backwards, and it is also easy, and perhaps rather unprofitable, to hazard opinions about what would have happened if things had been otherwise.  Nevertheless, when we look back on the spirit of the country as it was in those early days of the war, when the violation of Belgium had sent a chivalrous thrill through the hearts of all classes in the country, when we all recognised that we were faced with the greatest crisis in our history, that our country and the future of civilisation were about to be tested by the severest strain ever applied to them, that the life and fortune of the individual did not count, but that the war and victory were the only interests that any one had a right to consider—­when one remembers all these things, and the use that a wise financial policy might have made of them, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the history of the war in this country and its social and political effects might have been something much finer, much cleaner and more noble if only the weapons of finance had been more boldly and wisely used.  It is not a good thing to indulge in high-falutin’ on this subject.  It is absurd to suppose that the war suddenly turned