“Circumstances arising out of the war and developments likely to arise on its conclusion” give this Committee a roving commission to consider all kinds of things, which may or may not happen, in the light of wisdom which may be put before it by interested witnesses, and, worse still, in the light of semi-official pressure to produce a report which will go down well with the House of Commons.  Our politicians are at present in a state of extreme servility before the enterprising gentlemen who are now at the head of what is called the Labour Party.  Every one will sympathise with the aspirations of this party in so far as they aim at bettering the lot of those who do the hard and uninteresting work of the world, and giving them a larger share of the productions that they help to turn out; but that is not the same thing as giving obsequious attention to the views which their representatives may have concerning the management of financial affairs, on the subject of which their knowledge is necessarily limited and their outlook is likely to be, to a certain extent, prejudiced.  A recent manifesto put forward by the leaders of the new Labour Party includes in its programme the acquisition by the nation of the means of production—­in other words, the expropriation of private capitalists.  The Labour people very probably think that by this simple method they will be able to save the labourer the cost of providing capital and the interest which is paid for its use; and people who are actuated by this fallacy, which implies that the rate paid to capital is thinly disguised robbery, inevitably have warped views concerning the machinery of finance and the earnings of financiers.  These views, expressed in practical legislation, might have the most serious effects not only upon England’s financial supremacy but also on the industrial activity which that financial supremacy does so much to maintain and foster.

What, after the war, will be the most important need, from the material point of view, for the inhabitants of this country?  However the war may end, and whatever may happen between now and the end of it, there can be only one answer to this question, and that answer is greatly increased production.  The war has already diminished our capital resources to the extent of the whole amount that we have raised by borrowing abroad, that is to say, by pledging the production of our existing capital, and by selling to foreign countries the foreign securities in which our capitalists had invested during the previous century.  No one knows the extent to which our capital resources have been impaired by these two processes, but it may be guessed at as somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1500 millions; that is to say, about 10 per cent. of a liberal estimate of the total accumulated property of the country at the beginning of the war.  To this direct diminution in our capital resources we have to add the impossibility, which has existed during the war, of maintaining our factories and industrial