No estimate has so far appeared which fixes the 1916 deficit which England will have to meet at less than $7,000,000,000, based on a total war cost for the calendar year of $9,000,000,000. How to grapple with the gigantic task conjured up by such a prospect is not engaging popular attention to any marked degree, though upon its solution depends, primarily, Britain’s ability to conquer in this war of exhaustion. With the palpable impossibility of raising the wind at home by successive new public loans; with the necessity to invoke such heroic measures as borrowing $500,000,000 in America to bolster up sterling exchange and keep British credit "intact"; with Englishmen sacrificing their enormous holdings of American securities for the same pious purpose; with the British industrial plant so preoccupied with munitions that it can neither, in accordance with tradition, pay for British imports with British exports nor increase British revenue by the same token; with national expenditure advancing by gigantic leaps and national income restricted as it never was before; with all these immutable conditions staring at Englishmen, it is no wonder that those of them who think, as distinguished from those who merely hurrah, contemplate what looms ahead with anxious concern. But admittedly grave as the future is, it is by no means hopeless. Britain’s plight is not "desperate," as the Germans, seeking to hide their own, are so fond of making believe. Even the misgivings of Englishmen themselves regarding their economic situation would be promptly and legitimately resolved into confidence if the community as a whole could be induced to pull itself together and look facts in the face. In its incorrigible disinclination to do so alone lies danger. The British Empire is not bankrupt. It can hardly ever become so. A recent estimate assessed the income of the Empire, including India, at something over the fabulous sum of $20,000,000,000! It may be embarrassed--it is unquestionably that already--just as the richest of men frequently are, in the midst of titanic transactions which have outrun their calculations. But embarrassment seldom eventuates in ruin, either for men or nations, if they come to grips with it betimes. Thus, disaster can only follow tribulation in the case of Britain if her people, preferring to wallow in happy-go-lucky nonchalance and drift, postpone until too late those sagacious, clean-sweep measures of reorganization and retrenchment which alone, in the opinion of competent judges, can save the situation.