for the war would have been placed at the
disposal of the Government by a reduction in spending on the part of
those who have the spending power. In other words, the only process
required would have been the readjustment of industrial output from
the production of goods needed (or thought to be needed) for ordinary
individuals to those required for war purposes. This readjustment
would have gone on gradually as the war's cost increased. There
would have been no competition between the Government and private
individuals for a limited amount of goods in a restricted market,
which has had such a disastrous effect on prices during the course of
the war; there would have been no manufacture of new currency, which
means the creation of new buying power at a time when there are less
goods to buy, which has had an equally fatal effect on prices; there
would have had to be a very drastic reform in our system of taxation,
by which the income tax, the only really equitable engine by which the
Government can get much money out of us, would have been reformed so
as to have borne less hardly upon those with families to bring up.

Mr Sidney Webb and the Fabians have advocated a system by which the
basis of assessment for income tax should be the income divided by the
number of members of a family, rather than the mere income without any
consideration for the number of people that have to be provided for
out of it. With some such scheme as this adopted there is no reason
why the Government should not have taken, for example, the whole of
all incomes above L1000 a year for each individual, due allowance
being made for obligations, such as rent, which involve long
contracts. For any single individual to want to spend more than
L1000 a year on himself or herself at such a crisis would have been
recognised, in the early days of the war, as an absurdity; any surplus
above that line might readily have been handed over to the Government,
half of it perhaps in taxation and the other half in the form of a
forced loan.

So sweeping a change would not have been necessary at first, perhaps
not at all, because the war's cost would not have grown nearly so
rapidly. All surplus income above a certain line would have been taken
for the time being, but with the promise to repay half the amount
taken, so that it should not be made a disadvantage to be rich, and no
discouragement to accumulation would have been brought about. By this
means the whole of