to supply the subscriptions
to the war loans, and those holdings have again been hypothecated to
subscribe to subsequent loans. The Pledged Allies with longer stockings
have not yet got to this pitch of overlapping. But everywhere in Europe
what is happening is a great transformation of the property owner into a
_rentier_, and the passing of realty into the hands of the State.

At the end of the war Great Britain will probably find herself with a
national debt so great that she will be committed to the payment of an
annual interest greater in figures than the entire national expenditure
before the war. As an optimistic lady put it the other day: "All the
people who aren't killed will be living quite comfortably on War Loan
for the rest of their lives."

But part, at least, of the bulk of this wealth will be imaginary rather
than real because of the rise in prices, in wages, in rent, and in
taxation. Most of us who are buying the British and French War Loans
have no illusions on that score; we know we are buying an income of
diminishing purchasing power. Yet it would be a poor creature in these
days when there is scarcely a possible young man in one's circle who has
not quite freely and cheerfully staked his life, who was not prepared to
consider his investments as being also to an undefined extent a national
subscription.

A rise in prices is not, however, the only process that will check the
appearance of a new rich usurer class after the war. There is something
else ahead that has happened already in Germany, that is quietly coming
about among the Allies, and that is the cessation of gold payments. In
Great Britain, of course, the pound note is still convertible into a
golden sovereign; but Great Britain will not get through the war on
those terms. There comes a point in the stress upon a Government when it
must depart from the austerer line of financial rectitude--and tamper in
some way with currency.

Sooner or later, and probably in all cases before 1917, all the
belligerents will be forced to adopt inconvertible paper money for their
internal uses. There will be British assignats or greenbacks. It will
seem to many financial sentimentalists almost as though Great Britain
were hauling down a flag when the sovereign, which has already
disappeared into bank and Treasury coffers, is locked up there and
reserved for international trade. But Great Britain has other sentiments
to consider than the finer feelings of b