This much at least seems to be agreed by most reasonable people about the debt charge--that it will have to be raised, either by a Levy on Capital or by income tax or some other form of direct taxation, from those who are blessed with a margin. We are not likely to repeat our ancestors' mistake, after the Napoleonic War, of throwing the whole burden on to the general consumer by indirect taxation of necessaries and of articles of general consumption. Even Tariff "Reformers" say little about the revenue that their fiscal schemes would bring in. And with good reason. For in so far as they secured Protection they would bring in no revenue; we cannot at once keep out foreign goods and tax them; and any revenue that they brought in would be most expensively raised, because a large part of the extra price paid by the consumer would go not to the State but into the pockets of the home producer. Nor is it likely that any of the many schemes--of which Mr Stilwell's "Great Plan, How to Pay for the War," is a particularly bold example--for paying off debt by a huge issue of inconvertible currency, will achieve any practical result. Not only would they defraud the debt-holder by paying him off in currency enormously depreciated by the multiplication of it that would be involved; but they would also, by that depreciation, throw the burden of the debt on the shoulders of the general consumer through a further disastrous rise in prices, and so would accentuate the bitterness and discontent already rife owing to the war-time dearness and all the suspicions of profiteering and exploitation that it has engendered.