If you keep on taking wealth as though from an increase, when really there is no increase out of which that wealth can come, the process must, sooner or later, come to an end. It is as though you were to claim a hundred bushels of apples every year from an orchard after the orchard had ceased to bear, or as though you were to claim a daily supply of water from a spring which had dried up. The man who would have to pay the apples would have to get them as best he could, but by the time the claim was being made on all the orchards of the world, by the time that usury was asking a million bushels of apples a year, though only half a million were being produced, there would be a jam. The interest would not be forthcoming, and the machinery for collecting it would stop working. Long before it actually stopped, of course, people would find increasing difficulty in getting their interest and increasing trouble would appear in all the commercial world. Now that is exactly what is beginning to happen to-day after about two centuries of usury and one century of unrestricted usury. So far we have got out of it by all manner of makeshifts. Those who have borrowed the money and have promised to pay, say, 5 per cent., are allowed to change and to pay only 2½ per cent. Or, by the process of debasing currency, which I described earlier in this book, the value of the money is changed, so that a man who has been set down to pay, say, a hundred sheep a year, is really only paying 50 or 30 sheep a year. A more drastic method is the method of “writing off” loans altogether--simply saying: “I simply cannot get my interest, and so I must stop asking for it.” That is what happens when a Government goes bankrupt, as the Government of Germany has done. If you look at the Usury created by the Great War, you will see this kind of thing going on on all sides. The Governments that were fighting borrowed money from individuals and promised interest upon it. Most of that money was not used productively: it was used for buying wheat and metal, and machinery and the rest, but the wheat was not used to feed workmen who were producing more wealth. It was used to feed soldiers who were producing no wealth, and so were the ships and the metal and the machinery, etc. Therefore when the individuals who had lent the money began collecting from the Government interest upon what they had lent they were asking every year for wealth which simply was not there, and the Governments have got out of their promise to pay a usurious interest in all sorts of ways--some by repudiating, that is saying that they _would_ not pay (the Russians have done that), others by debasing currency in various degrees. The English Government has cut down what it promised to pay to about half, and by taxing this it has further reduced it to rather less than a third. The French Government, by inflation and by taxation, have reduced it much more--to less than a fourth, or perhaps more like a sixth or an eighth.