Then the merciless Chancellor of the Exchequer acquainted Parliament with his scheme for raising a part of this Brobdingnagian revenue. Free trade must be partially shelved. There will be a revenue tariff on "luxury" imports. Income-tax in 1916 will be forty per cent. higher and will amount altogether to about fifty cents on every five dollars earned. Even the man with $650 a year will pay, while "plutocrats" with incomes above that figure will be mulcted even more relentlessly. He of $25,000 will pay $5,150, and nabobs with $50,000, $100,000 and $500,000 per annum (England has several in the latter category) will contribute, respectively, $12,650, $30,150 and $170,150. War is hell. No wonder a parliamentary wag, on the day Mr. McKenna introduced "Conscription of Wealth," interrupted with a merry "Why don’t you take it all?" Up to December, 1915, the Government had asked Parliamentary sanction for war credits aggregating $6,500,000,000. But even this staggering total (the war was now costing $25,000,000 a day) was planned to carry the campaign only up to the middle of November. The $500,000,000 loan transaction in the United States only produced funds to be spent there, and it was but half of what was asked. It only indirectly relieves the situation at home. Allowing for the deficit carried over from last year, the latest budget proposes taxes amounting to $1,525,000,000 and loans aggregating $6,425,000,000 for the fiscal year 1915-16. But even the most patriotic experts in Threadneedle Street acknowledge the utter impossibility of raising $6,425,000,000 of genuine money by public loan in Britain per year. They reluctantly predict that the Government will soon be driven to extend its use of fictitious money and paper--on the excoriated German model. The war has already eaten toward the bottom of the stockings and the strong-boxes of Britain where American securities are stored. As the financier not only of her own colossal requirements in the war, but as banker for her allies, England’s money necessities are thus seen to be no less urgent than her need of men and munitions. They comprise, these three M’s, the trilogy on which the existence of the Empire now depends. British performances in respect to the cash sinews of war have truly been on a monumental scale. History shows no parallel for the achievement of raising at home in loans and Treasury bills over $5,500,000,000 without abandonment of the gold standard and without resort to inconvertible paper, and yet keeping British credit at an altitude which gives hard-headed Uncle Sam no pause in taking John Bull’s I-O-U for another half billion. It is an imperishable tribute to the stamina, prestige, wealth and commercial fabric of the British Empire and to the enterprise and ingenuity of the merchants, manufacturers, shippers, bankers and traders who have made their islands the center of the world’s exchanges and London the money-market of the universe.