e to the amount of these sales, and we may perhaps guess
them at L1000 millions. If the pre-war estimates of our overseas
investments at L4000 millions were anywhere near the mark. It thus
appears that we shall end the war still a great creditor nation.

In so far as the debt was raised at home, the war was paid for by
those who bought the securities offered, and we have now to pay them
interest and set about repaying them the capital. This process
will not diminish the national wealth, but will only affect its
distribution. It will not diminish the amount of available capital,
but may even rather increase it by gathering into the hands of the
debt-holders--who are ex-hypothesi folk with an inclination for
saving--money that might, if left in the hands of those from whom it
is collected, have been squandered. The payment of the debt charge
merely means that those who came forward with their money when they
were asked to subscribe to war loans, have, according to the extent
of the effort that they then made, a set-off against the subsequent
taxation involved by the war debt. It would have been a much simpler
and more businesslike proceeding to have taken, instead of borrowing,
a much larger proportion of the war's cost during the war; but it is
too late now to rub in this platitude which is now pretty generally
admitted. Mr Hoare showed in last month's Journal that the creation
of the War Debt has caused a huge addition to what he has called
Rente--the gross income of the propertied classes; and there is much
logic in his contention that this income is the source from which the
debt charge should be met. At the same time both justice and economic
expediency seem to demand that his wider interpretation of Rente, to
make it include the earnings of those whose special qualifications
(or, we may add, special luck) put them in a position to earn more
easily than the struggling majority, should be applied to taxation
involved by the debt charge.

How, then, shall we deal with the debt? In the first place we want
a good Sinking Fund--1 per cent. at least--and all realisations of
assets in the shape of loans repaid, ships, etc., sold, should be
used for reduction of our foreign debt. For the home charge we want a
special form of income tax that will fall as lightly and indirectly
as possible on industry; that is, that it should be imposed on the
individual taxpayer direct. So that what we want is an extended,
reformed and bett