2. The banks, especially in England, are all in one combination and keep detailed information upon all of us. Not only have they control over industry through their power to make or withhold the money which they alone can now create and hand out to those they favour, but they also keep indexes of detailed information as thorough and widespread as those of any Government office. They have a secret service more widespread and powerful than that of the State, and this hidden power of theirs, though private and concealed knowledge, irritates plain men more and more. People feel that they are not free, and that the banking system, which is international in essence, is a universal and hidden master. Therefore all over the world to-day people are saying: “The banking system, and the few men who direct it, are altogether too powerful. They control our lives. They are beginning to control the public policy of the State, especially in England, and there ought to be a national authority superior to them and keeping them in order.” A great many schemes have lately been on all sides proposed to establish such a superior authority. Thus, we have in England a very powerful movement in favour of what is called the “Douglas Scheme of Credit,” and of course the Socialists, with their ideas of State control of everything, would also put an end to the private power of the banking system. Then there are those who want to have a strong King who would be able to override any lesser power in the State, including the bankers.[5] But the points to seize in understanding the political economy of our time are those I have just been describing to you: what the banking system is, how it arose, how unnaturally powerful it has become, and why a universal revolt is arising against it. There will be a struggle inevitably between the banking, or financial, interest and the people all over civilised countries: but no one can tell which will win. In industrial countries the odds are in favour of the banks, or financiers. In peasant countries against them. NATIONAL LOANS AND TAXATION Every country must, to carry on its national services, raise taxes from its citizens, and those taxes, though levied in money, translate themselves, of course, into goods, that is, economic values attached to material objects. We say that the State “raises,” say, a hundred million pounds in taxation from its citizens a year, for “State Purposes”; and when you come to look into what is actually got by the State and how the State uses what it has got, it means that the State levies so many boots and so much bread, and so much housing material and so much clothing, and spends this again in maintaining State servants, that is, in clothing and housing and feeding soldiers and policemen, and civil servants and school teachers, and so on.