The rich may well gasp at the figure, and ask what does the Government do with it all? What value do they get for this contribution which appears so prodigious to most of us who have to count our incomes in hundreds a year and not in millions a day? Well, the Government provides an army and navy, a civil service, courts of law and so forth; and, as we have seen, it provides them either at cost price or more nearly at cost price than any commercial concern would. But over a hundred million solid pounds of it are handed over every year in hard cash in pensions and doles to the unfortunate people who have small incomes or none. This is pure redistribution of income: that is, pure Socialism. The officers of the Government take the money from the rich and give it to the poor because the poor have not enough and the rich have too much, without regard to their personal merits. And here again there is no constitutional limit to the process. I can remember a time when there was no supertax, and the income tax was twopence in the pound instead of four-and-sixpence or five shillings, and when Gladstone hoped to abolish it altogether. Nobody dreamt then of using taxation as an instrument for effecting a more equal distribution of income. Nowadays it is one of the chief uses of taxation; and it could be carried to complete equality without any change in our annual exchequer routine. So far the poor have the better of the bargain. But some of the rich do very well out of the taxes. By far the heaviest single item of Government expenditure is the annual payment for the hire of the money we borrowed for the war. It is all spent and gone; but we must go on paying for the hire until we replace and repay it. Most of it was borrowed from the rich, because they alone had any spare money to lend. Consequently the Government takes a vast sum of money every year from the whole body of rich, and immediately hands it back to those who lent it money for the war. The effect of this transaction is simply to redistribute income between the rich themselves. Those who lose by it make a fuss about what they call the burden of the National Debt; but the nation is not a penny the poorer for taking money from one bold Briton and giving it to another. Whether the transfer is for better or worse depends on whether it increases or diminishes the existing inequality. Unfortunately, it is bound, on the whole, to increase it, because the Government, instead of taking money from some capitalists and dividing it among them all, is taking money from all capitalists and dividing it among some of them. This is the real mischief of the National Debt, which, in so far as it is owed to our own people, is not a debt at all. To illustrate, one may say that an elephant does not complain of being burdened because its legs have to carry its own weight; but if all the weight were on one side instead of being equally distributed between the legs, the elephant would hardly be able to