Every year must bring its own fresh harvest and its new generations of sheep and cattle: we cannot live on what is left of last year’s harvest; and as next year’s does not yet exist, we must live in the main on this year’s, making things and using them up, sowing and reaping, brewing and baking, breeding and butchering (unless we are vegetarians like myself), soiling and washing, or else dying of dirt and starvation. What is called saving is only making bargains for the future. For instance, if I bake a hundred and one loaves of bread, I can eat no more than the odd one; and I cannot save the rest, because they will be uneatable in a week. All I can do is to bargain with somebody who wants a hundred loaves to be eaten on the spot by himself and his family and persons in his employment, that if I give my hundred spare loaves to him he will give me, say, five new loaves to eat every year in future. But that is not saving up the loaves. It is only a bargain between two parties: one who wants to provide for the future, and another who wants to spend heavily in the present. Consequently I cannot save until I find somebody else who wants to spend. The notion that we could all save together is silly: the truth is that only a few well-off people who have more than they need can afford to provide for their future in this way; and they could not do it were there not others spending more than they possess. Peter must spend what Paul saves, or Paul’s savings will go rotten. Between the two nothing is saved. The nation as a whole must make its bread and eat it as it goes along. A nation which stopped working would be dead in a fortnight even if every man, woman, and child in it had houses and lands and a million of money in the savings bank. When you see the rich man’s wife (or anyone else’s wife) shaking her head over the thriftlessness of the poor because they do not all save, pity the lady’s ignorance; but do not irritate the poor by repeating her nonsense to them. 3 HOW MUCH FOR EACH?