After all, this problem of the war debt, in so far as it is held at home, is not one that ought to terrify us if we look at it steadily. People talk and write as if when the war is over the business of paying for it will begin. That is not really so. The war has been paid for as it went on, and, except in so far as it has been financed by borrowing abroad, it has been paid for by us as a nation. Whatever we have used for the war we have paid for as it went on, partly with the help of loans from America and from other countries--Argentina, Holland, Switzerland, etc.--that have lent us money. These loans amount, as far as they can be traced from the official figures, to about £1300 millions. Against them we can set our loans to our Dominions, over £200 millions (a perfectly good asset), and our loans to our Allies, perhaps £1500 millions, which the Chancellor proposes to write down by 50 per cent., and might perhaps treat still more drastically. To meet this foreign debt we shall have to turn out so much stuff--goods and services of all kinds--for sale abroad to meet the interest and repayment. We have further impoverished ourselves by selling our foreign securities abroad No figure has been published giving any clue to the amount of these sales, and we may perhaps guess them at £1000 millions. If the pre-war estimates of our overseas investments at £4000 millions were anywhere near the mark. It thus appears that we shall end the war still a great creditor nation. In so far as the debt was raised at home, the war was paid for by those who bought the securities offered, and we have now to pay them interest and set about repaying them the capital. This process will not diminish the national wealth, but will only affect its distribution. It will not diminish the amount of available capital, but may even rather increase it by gathering into the hands of the debt-holders--who are ex-hypothesi folk with an inclination for saving--money that might, if left in the hands of those from whom it is collected, have been squandered. The payment of the debt charge merely means that those who came forward with their money when they were asked to subscribe to war loans, have, according to the extent of the effort that they then made, a set-off against the subsequent taxation involved by the war debt. It would have been a much simpler and more businesslike proceeding to have taken, instead of borrowing, a much larger proportion of the war's cost during the war; but it is too late now to rub in this platitude which is now pretty generally admitted. Mr Hoare showed in last month's Journal that the creation of the War Debt has caused a huge addition to what he has called Rente--the gross income of the propertied classes; and there is much logic in his contention that this income is the source from which the debt charge should be met. At the same time both justice and economic expediency seem to demand that his wider interpretation of Rente, to