If you consider this a little you will see that the difference between private affairs and State affairs is that private affairs are what people can do by themselves, one at a time and once in a way, whereas State affairs are what we are all made to do by law at the same moment. At home you are a private woman dealing with your own private affairs; but if you go into Parliament and perhaps into the Cabinet, you become a stateswoman. As a private woman all you have to consider is, “Suppose I were to do this or that”. But as a stateswoman you must consider “Suppose everybody had to do this or that”. This is called the Kantian test. For instance, if you become Chancellor of the Exchequer, your common sense as a private woman will save you from such a folly as supposing that a sewing-machine in the house is the same as £5 in the house. But that very same private common sense of yours may persuade you that an income of £5 a year is the same as £100 ready money, because you know that if you want £100 your stockbroker can get it for you in exchange for £5 a year of your income. You might therefore be tempted to lay a tax of £30 on everyone with £5 a year, and imagine that you would not only get the £30, but that the taxpayer would have £70 left to go on with. Let me therefore explain the nature of this business of £5 a year being worth £100 cash to you privately, and worth just £5 a year to the Chancellor publicly and not a rap more. When we were dealing with the impossibility of saving I pointed out that there are certain everyday transactions that are like saving and that are called saving, very much as selling a sewing-machine and buying food with the price may be called eating the sewing-machine. Do not bother to try to remember this now: it is easier to go over it again. Suppose you have £100 and you wish to save it: that is, to consume it at some future time instead of immediately! The objection is that as the things the money represents will rot unless they are used at once, what you want to do is impossible. But suppose there is in the next street a woman who has been left by the death of her parents with nothing but an income of £5 a year. Evidently she cannot live on that. But if she had £100 in ready money she could emigrate, or set up a typewriting office, or stock a little shop, or take lessons in some moneymaking art, or buy some smart clothes to improve her chances of getting respectable employment, or any of the things that poor women imagine they could do if only they had a little ready money. Now nothing is easier than for you to make an exchange with this woman. She gives you her right to take £5 every year fresh-and-fresh out of each year’s harvest as it comes; and you give her your hundred pounds to spend at once. Your stockbroker or banker will bring you together. You go to him and say that you want him to invest your £100 for you at five per cent; and she goes to him and says that she wants to sell her £5