the equipment of industry
will make it necessary to import as rapidly and as cheaply as possible
in order to promote our after-war recovery.

Apart from these purely economic arguments against the high proportion
of the war's costs that we are meeting by borrowing, there is the much
more important fact of its bad effect on the minds of our soldiers,
and of those members of the civilian population who draw mistaken
inferences from its effects. From the point of view of our soldiers,
who have to go and fight for their country at a time when those who
are left at home are earning high wages and making big profits, it is
evidently highly unfair that the war should be financed by a method
which postpones taxation. The civilian population left at home,
earning high profits and high wages, should clearly pay as much as
possible during the war by immediate taxation, so that the burden of
taxation may be relieved for our soldiers when they return to civil
life. In view of the hardships and dangers which our soldiers have to
face, and the heroism with which they are facing them, this argument
should be of overwhelming strength in the eyes of every citizen who
has imagination enough to conceive what our fighting men are doing for
us and how supreme is our duty to do everything to relieve them from
any other burden except those which the war compels them to face.
There is also the fact that many members of our uninstructed
industrial population believe that the richer classes are growing
richer owing to the war, and battening on the proceeds of the loans.
I do not think that this is true; on the contrary, I believe that
the war has brought a considerable shifting of buying power from the
well-to-do classes to the manual workers. Nevertheless, in these times
misconceptions are awkwardly active for evil. The well-to-do classes
as a whole are not really benefited by having their future incomes
pledged in order to meet the future debt charge, and if, at the same
time, they are believed to be acquiring the right to wealth, which
wealth they will have themselves to provide, the fatuity of the
borrowing policy becomes more manifest. For these reasons it is
sincerely to be hoped that our next fiscal year will be marked by
a much higher revenue from taxation, a considerable decrease in
expenditure, and a consequently great improvement in the proportion of
war's cost met out of revenue, on what has been done in the past year.
At our presen