[Illustration: Lord Northcliffe] But magnificent as has been the past, the financial future can not be viewed except with anxiety. Indebtedness has been piled up sky-high--out of every twenty-five dollars spent since the war began, at least twenty dollars has been borrowed. That was possible because of the superlative excellence of British credit. "Our credit is now almost everything," explains _The Economist_. "It comes next to the Navy, and the two can not be dissociated. For if either suffer, our food supplies would be in danger. In one sense, credit is at the mercy of the Government and of the Treasury, for a great false step of policy or continuance in a false course would bring disaster. The responsibility of the Prime Minister and of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and of the Cabinet, as a whole, is prodigious. Whatever else we do, we must maintain our financial equilibrium. With that and the command of the seas, we can not be defeated." Manifestly Britain’s economic problem is almost the darkest spot on her overclouded war horizon--the problem of meeting rising obligations out of falling revenue. The Empire suffers from no lack of men; its physical resources are well-nigh inexhaustible. If patriotism does not send them to the trenches of their own free will in adequate numbers, they will be "fetched." There is no longer any question of shortage of munitions. England’s own vast industrial plant, as well as that of France, is now occupied almost exclusively in the production of man-killing merchandise for the Allies and is turning it out at high pressure. To the manufacturing equipment of England and France are harnessed, in addition, German bombs and German-incited strikes to the contrary notwithstanding, the limitless productive facilities of the United States and Canada. Britain’s one and only nightmare is money, and its corollary aspects, exchange and credit.