With a system so prevalent as imperial industry, so knit up with every phase of life and thought, and so determining a factor in all our concepts, united as it is with two such invincible allies as advertising and propaganda, it is inconceivable that it should be overthrown by any human force from without. Holding it to be essentially wrong, it seems to me providential that it is already showing signs of falling by its own weight. Production of commodities has far exceeded production of the means of payment, and society is now running on promises to pay, on paper obligations, on anticipations of future production and sale, on credit, in a word. The war has enormously magnified this condition until an enforced liquidation would mean bankruptcy for all the nations of the earth, while the production of utilities is decreasing in proportion to the production of luxuries, labour is exacting increasing pay for decreasing hours of work and quality of output, and the enormous financial structure, elaborately and ingeniously built up through several generations, is in grave danger of immediate catastrophe. The whole world is in the position of an insolvent debtor who is so deeply involved that his creditors cannot afford to let him go into bankruptcy, and so keep him out of the Poor Debtor's Court by doling out support from day to day. Confidence is the only thing that keeps matters going; what happens when this is lost is now being demonstrated in many parts of Europe. The optimist claims that increased production, coupled with enforced economy, will produce a satisfactory solution, but there is no evidence that labour, now having the whip-hand, will give up its present advantage sufficiently to make this possible; even if it did, payment must be in the form of exchange or else in further promises to pay, while the capacity of the world for consumption is limited somewhere, though thus far "big business" has failed to recognize this fact. At present the interest charges on debts, both public and private, have reached a point where they come near to consuming all possible profits even from a highly accelerated rate of production. Altogether it is reasonable to assume that the present financial-industrial system is near its term for reasons inherent in itself, let alone the possibility of a further extension of the drastic and completely effective measures of destruction that are characteristics of Bolshevism and its blood-brothers. Assuming that this is so, two questions arise: what is to take the place of imperial industry, and how is this substitution to be brought about?