pensions, endowed institutions, the Church,
insurance companies, and the like. They are all being scaled down. They
are all more able to stand scaling down than the proletarians.

Assuming that it is possible to bring up wages to the level of the
higher prices, and that the rise in rents can be checked by legislation
or captured by taxation, the rise in prices is, on the whole, a thing to
the advantage of the propertyless man as against accumulated property.
It writes off the past and clears the way for a fresh start in the
future.

An age of cheapness is an old usurers' age. England before the war was a
paradise of ancient usuries; everywhere were great houses and enclosed
parks; the multitude of gentlemen's servants and golf clubs and such
like excrescences of the comfort of prosperous people was perpetually
increasing; it did not "pay" to build labourers' cottages, and the more
expensive sort of automobile had driven the bicycle as a pleasure
vehicle off the roads. Western Europe was running to fat and not to
muscle, as America is to-day.

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