a year for ready money. He effects the change for a small commission. But the transaction is disguised under such fantastic names (like the water and breadcrumb in doctors’ prescriptions) that neither you nor the other woman understands what has really happened. You are said to have invested £100, and to be “worth” £100, and to have added £100 to the capital of the country: and she is said to have “realized her capital”. But all that has actually occurred is that your £100 has been handed over to be spent and done for by the other woman, and that you are left with the right to take £5 out of the income of the country without working for it year after year for ever, or until you in your turn sell that right for £100 down if you should unhappily find yourself in the same predicament as the other lady was in when you bought it. Now suppose you brought in your tax of £30 on every £5 a year in the country! Or suppose a Conservative Government, led by the nose by practical business men who know by experience that people who have £5 a year can sell it for £100 whenever they want to, were to do it! Or suppose a Labor Government, misled by the desire to take capital out of private hands and vest it in the State, were to do it! They would call it a levy of thirty per cent on capital; and most of them would vote for it without understanding what it really meant. Its opponents would vote against it in equal ignorance of its nature; so that their arguments would convince nobody. What would happen? Evidently no woman could pay £30 out of £5 a year. She would have to sell the £5 a year for £100, and then reinvest the odd £70. But she would not get the £100 because, as the tax would not fall on her alone, but on all the other capitalists as well, her stockbroker would find everybody asking him to sell future incomes for ready money and nobody offering ready money for future incomes. It would be the story of the sewing-machines over again. She would have to tell the tax collector that she could not pay the tax, and that he might sell her furniture and be damned (intelligent women use recklessly strong language under such circumstances). But the tax collector would reply that her furniture was no good to him; for as he was selling up all the other capitalists’ furniture at the same time, and as only those who were too poor to have any capital to be taxed were buying it, Chippendale chairs were down to a shilling a dozen and dining room tables to five shillings; so that it would cost him more to take her furniture away and sell it or store it than it would fetch. He would have to go away empty handed; and all the Government could do would be to take her £5 a year from her for six years and four months, the odd months being for the interest to pay for waiting. In other words it would find that her income was real, and her capital imaginary.