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 made by our rulers through taxation was very much below the results achieved by their predecessors at times when the country was much poorer and much less united in its determination. And yet we know that these earlier and better precedents were in their minds. For in the speech which opened Mr. Lloyd George's Budget that imposed not one half-pennyworth of taxation he went out of his way, after calling the country's attention to the huge gulf between revenue and expenditure, to say that he could have filled it by taking less of the country's income than was taken at the end of the Napoleonic war. Thus he was of those that rebel against the light; for one can surely contend without being charged with idealistic rainbow-chasing, that what we did at the beginning of the nineteenth century we could have done again at the beginning of the twentieth.

It is not possible to guess how much of the money that the Government got by borrowing was real saved money contributed by investors and how much was new spending created by banks either through direct advances to Government or through loans to customers for the purpose of lending. Banking figures, ever discreet in their reticences, naturally drew no