rises, so also do rates of insurance and competent seamen’s wages. Large as the seafaring class is, the demand made on it in war-time by a great Power sensibly diminishes it, and so increases the value of the remaining seamen. All sea-borne goods must rise perceptibly in price, and so, though the reason is not so apparent, do all metals; and owing to the law which tends to equalise all profits, so in smaller proportion do all other vendible things. The phenomenon called by housewives “dearness” appears at once; and as the possessing and trading classes, distributors excepted, fret under cheapness, this is for the time a satisfaction to them. Landlords, shipowners, planters abroad, farmers at home, mineowners, and manufacturers with large stocks, classes which greatly influence opinion, deem themselves to be, and in some instances are, decidedly better-off. Nor are the distributing classes at first injured. Much of the enormous expenditure of war goes into their pockets; war is recognised as full excuse for heavier prices; and the demand from the well-to-do which so often makes the difference between profit and loss increases rather than diminishes. The currency, too, tends to become inflated by the issue of Government paper, not in the form of bank-notes, but of obligations of all kinds, signed by a firm—the Government—known to be solvent, and passing in large transactions from hand to hand, and inflation always produces the appearance of prosperity. The enormous mass of expense, again, based on borrowed money,—that is, practically, on future earnings,—swells the volume of available money in circulation, and enlarges, sometimes enormously, the profits of certain men, _e.g._, army contractors, who immediately spend on their own objects till the veins of the community seem full of blood. Even wages rise, and especially the wages of the poorest class, the half-skilled laborers. It is often supposed that this is not the case; but the truth would seem to be that the withdrawal of laborers from production caused by war, falling as it does, not on the whole people, but on a limited section of them,—namely, those who are at once poor, specially able-bodied, and under thirty-five,—greatly diminishes the total supply, and at once raises wages. This is thoroughly recognised on the Continent, where mobilisation affects such a huge mass of men, and even in England the numbers taken away are very serious. In a war of two years at least 100,000 men will require to be replaced, another 100,000 will be hired for garrison duty of all kinds, and a further contingent of unknown numbers will be employed in dockyards, transport services, and the endless forms of hard labor necessary to send armies to the field. If we remember that the half-skilled laborers are only a division of the people, and that agricultural laborers, in particular, upon whom much of the pressure falls, are only 600,000, we shall see