is best stated in
the more exact and precise terms that I have employed to deal with
it--the term's of the market-place. But to imply that the
conditions that there obtain are the affair merely of bankers and
financiers, to imply that these things do not touch the lives of
the mass, is simply to talk a nonsense the meaninglessness of which
only escapes some of us because in these matters we happen to be
very ignorant. It is not mainly usurers who suffer from bad finance
and bad economics (one may suggest that they are not quite so
simple); it is mainly the people as a whole.

Mr. Chesterton says that we should break this "net of usury" in
which the peoples are enmeshed. I agree heartily; but that net has
been woven mainly by war (and that diversion of energy and
attention from social management which war involves), and is, so
far as the debts of the European States are concerned (so large an
element of usury), almost solely the outcome of war. And if the
peoples go on piling up debt, as they must if they are to go on
piling up armaments (as Mr. Chesterton wants them to), giving the
best of their attention and emotion to sheer physical conflict,
instead of to organisation and understanding, they will merely
weave that web of debt and usury still closer; it will load us more
heavily and strangle us to a still greater extent. If usury is the
enemy, the remedy is to fight usury. Mr. Chesterton says the remedy
is for its victims to fight one another.

And you will not fight usury by hanging Rothschilds, for usury is
worst where that sort of thing is resorted to. Widespread debt is
the outcome of bad management and incompetence, economic or social,
and only better management will remedy it. Mr. Chesterton is sure
that better management is only arrived at by "killing and being
killed." He really does urge this method even in civil matters. (He
tells us that the power of Parliament over the Crown is real, and
that of the people over Parliament a sham, "because men killed and
were killed for the one, and not for the other.") It is the method
of Spanish America where it is applied more frankly and logically,
and where still, in many places, elections are a military affair,
the questions at issue being settled by killing and being killed,
instead of by