The second column well illustrates what a splendid investment gilt-edged stocks had been through the century from Waterloo to Mons, even if we omit altogether the abnormal values of 1896–97. Our table shows how the epoch of Diamond Jubilee was the culminating moment in the prosperity of the British middle class. But it also exhibits with the precision of figures the familiar bewailed plight of those who try to live on the income of the same trustee investments as before the war. The owner of consols in 1922 had a real income, one half of what he had in 1914 and one third of what he had in 1896. The whole of the improvement of the nineteenth century had been obliterated, and his situation was not quite so good as it had been after Waterloo. Some mitigating circumstances should not be overlooked. Whilst the war was a period of the dissipation of the community’s resources as a whole, it was a period of saving for the individuals of the saving class, who with their larger holdings of the securities of the Government now have an increased aggregate money claim on the receipts of the Exchequer. Also, the investing class, which has lost money, overlaps, both socially and by the ties of family, with the business class, which has made money, sufficiently to break in many cases the full severity of the loss. Moreover, in England, there has been a substantial recovery from the low point of 1920. But these things do not wash away the significance of the facts. The effect of the war, and of the monetary policy which has accompanied and followed it, has been to take away a large part of the real value of the possessions of the investing class. The loss has been so rapid and so intermixed in the time of its occurrence with other worse losses that its full measure is not yet separately apprehended. But it has effected, nevertheless, a far-reaching change in the relative position of different classes. Throughout the Continent the pre-war savings of the middle class, so far as they were invested in bonds, mortgages, or bank deposits, have been largely or entirely wiped out. Nor can it be doubted that this experience must modify social psychology towards the practice of saving and investment. What was deemed most secure has proved least so. He who neither spent nor “speculated,” who made “proper provision for his family,” who sang hymns to security and observed most straitly the morals of the edified and the respectable injunctions of the worldly-wise,--he, indeed, who gave fewest pledges to Fortune has yet suffered her heaviest visitations.