“To be really just,” the writer continued, “the process of taxation ... must be applied with greatest force to those who have accumulated their money since the outbreak of war, and only to a less degree to those whose fortunes have not been built upon their country’s necessity.  The difficulty of separating these two classes of wealth is great, and must, in the writer’s opinion, be effected by separate legislation—­legislation which might justly be based upon the increase in post-1913 incomes, a record of which should now be in preparation at Somerset House.”  Everyone will agree that everything possible should be done to take the burden of the war debt off the shoulders of those who have fought for us; but it is equally clear that now that the mischief of this huge debt has been done, it will be exceedingly difficult to repair it by any ingenuities of this kind.  For instance, if the kind of taxation—­in the shape of a Compulsory Loan—­proposed by “Ex-M.P.” were enforced, how can we be sure that it would not take a large slice off capital, the next heir to which is a soldier or a sailor?  Bad finance is so much easier to perpetrate than to remedy that one is almost certain to come across such objections as this to any scheme for making the war profiteers “cough up” some of their gains.

Moreover, we have to remember that by no means the whole of the war debt represents the gains of those who “have turned a national emergency to personal profit.”  Some people whose incomes have been actually decreased by the war, especially when currency depreciation is taken into account, have, in response to the appeals of the War Savings Committee, saved more than they ever saved before by patriotically stinting themselves.  And even the savers who have saved out of war profits were so far more patriotic than the war profiteers who did not save but squandered.  In all the discussion concerning the Levy on Capital I have not seen any answer (even in Mr Pethick Lawrence’s very persuasive little book in its favour) to the three great objections to it (1) that it lets off the squanderer and penalises the saver; (2) that the difficulty, trouble and expense involved by the necessary valuation, and the iniquities and frauds that are almost certain to arise out of it, will be enormous; and (3) that its economic effect may be very serious in discouraging accumulation.  “Why should any one save,” the unthrifty soul will most naturally ask, “if his savings are liable to have a slice cut out of them by a levy at any time?” The advocates of the Levy, and “Ex-M.P.” in his advocacy of a Compulsory Loan for repayment of debt; assume that it can be done once and for all and never again.  “Take one-fifth of a man’s savings away as an emergency measure not to be repeated, and he will at once endeavour to save it back again.”  But how will you persuade him that it is an emergency measure not to be repeated?  How can you be sure that it is so?  I have heard a very distinguished