Saving is such an entirely unpopular virtue that it seems at first sight a disastrous conclusion to arrive at, that if we want to increase the supply of capital it can only be done by stimulating this unattractive habit; and there is a further question to be asked—­whether it will be necessary or desirable to have a great increase in the supply of capital.  As was pointed out above, one theory of after-war needs maintains that the world will be so exhausted by this great struggle that it will have no enterprise and no energy left, and that capital will go begging.  If this be so, we need not trouble to inquire as to whether the supply of capital can be made plentiful.  But I venture to think that this view is very probably wrong, though it is very dangerous to prophesy concerning the purely psychological question of the state of mind in which the citizens of the warring Powers will end the war.  It is, however, at least probable that the prices which are then likely to rule will stimulate enterprise all over the world; that every one will see that there is a great work to be done in getting industry back on to a peace basis, and a great profit to be made by those who do this work most successfully, and that the demand for capital is likely, for some years at least, to clamour for all that can be produced.

To go back, then, to the statement that only by saving can capital be created.  The man who saves, instead of spending money on his own enjoyment, hands it over to some company or Government to be spent on some industrial or national purpose.  When it is put into industry it builds a factory or a ship or a railway or a canal, or clears a wilderness for cultivation, or does one of the innumerable other things which are necessary for the production and transport of the goods which mankind enjoys.  And it is only by this process of handing over buying power, instead of using it for our own amusement and enjoyment, to others who will use it for furthering production that the tools and equipment of industry can be multiplied.

Something can be done by banks and financiers in supplying credit in the form of advances and acceptances; but this method is only like oiling the wheel of industry, the real driving power of which has to be saved capital.  Creating credits simply means that a certain amount of buying power is manufactured and handed over to those to whom the credit is given.  It does not set free any labour or goods to be put into industry.  That is only done by the man who abstains from consumption and saves money by restraining his desire to spend it on himself, and puts it at the disposal of industry.  The man who saves money, who has always hitherto been rather despised by his companions and resented by a certain class of social reformer and many other uneducated people as a capitalist bloodsucker, is thus, in fact, the person who leaves the world richer than he found it, having put his money, the product of his own work, into increasing the world’s output, instead of spending it on such forms of enjoyment as heavy lunches and cinema shows.