There is a great danger to the State at the present time from large amounts of money rapidly acquired being accumulated in few hands. There are many signs that we are likely to enter a period which may be described as the reign of the "nouveaux riches." The great financiers, the persons with enormous interests in huge combines, will exercise more and more an undue and dangerous influence on fiscal policy and political life. The old nobility and the class of country gentlemen will have less power. Their resources will be seriously crippled, and their families perhaps extinguished through losses in the War. The middle class, which, in the last century, exercised the strongest influence on political life, and from which most of our men of letters and science have sprung, may now be crushed. On the more highly educated part of the middle classes whose means are limited the burden of the War has fallen most heavily. Taxation seems deliberately arranged to place as heavy a burden as possible on those of the middle classes who have children to bring up and to educate in the way they think best, and who endeavour to provide means by which their families can occupy the same position in life which their parents have done. The rate of income tax paid by a bachelor and a spinster is increased if they marry, although their necessary expenses will be enormously increased if they have a family to support. A bachelor with L500 a year may be living in ease and luxury; if he marries and has four or five children to educate he may find difficulty in meeting the needs of his family with L1,500. In the same way the death duties are absurdly small on the estate of the bachelor who leaves no family, but are a real hardship on the family of the man who dies leaving a number of children. The tendency is towards a rapid accumulation of huge fortunes. In considering the incidence of taxation Bacon's advice might well be remembered: "Above all things, good policy is to be used that the treasure and moneys in a State be not gathered into few hands, for otherwise the State may have great stock and yet starve, for money is like muck, not good except it be spread." CHAPTER XV NATIONAL EXPENDITURE _But where is the money to come from? Yes, that is to be asked. Let us as quite the first business in this our national crisis look not only into our affairs but into our accounts and obtain some notion of how we annually spend our money, and what we are getting for it. Not the public revenue only; of that some account is rendered already. But let us do the best we can to set down the items of the national private expenditure and know what we spend altogether and how._--JOHN RUSKIN.