ankers 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
thos