nviction is still cherished to this day, and there can
be no doubt that if those who cherish it hold on to it long enough
they will come right some day.

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