discussion, adjustment, a desire and capacity to see the point of view of the other man—­of all of which war and its philosophy is the negation.

To all of this Mr. Chesterton replies:  “That only concerns the Jews and the moneylenders.”  Again, this is not true.  It concerns all of us, like all problems of our struggle with Nature.  It is in part at least an economic problem, and that part of it 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 the cowardly, pacifist methods current in Europe.  The result gives us the really military civilisations of Venezuela, Colombia, Nicaragua, and Paraguay.  And, although the English system may have many defects—­I think it has—­those defects exist in a still