If the Government is allowed to go on financing the war by increasing the currency with the very reluctant help of the bankers, the difficulties of maintaining our gold standard and keeping the exchanges in favour of London will be very greatly magnified when the war is over and our gold reserves are no longer protected by the submarines and the high cost of shipping gold that they produce. It therefore follows that all who have the true interests of the City at heart should use all the influence they can to force the Government to adopt a sounder financial policy before it is too late. It is true that our war finance has hitherto been sounder than that of any other warring Power, but it has fallen very short if we apply the rough test of the proportion of the cost of war borne out of taxation and compare our performance with the results achieved by our ancestors in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars. If we have done better than France, Italy, Russia and Germany in this respect, it must also be remembered that the financial prestige which these countries had to maintain was not nearly so great and well established as ours, with the possible exception of France; and France, being exposed to the ravages of a ruthless invader, was in a position which put special obstacles in the way of the canons of sound finance. If, then, there are certain dangers that threaten our financial position when the war is over, we must remember, on the other hand, that the war has already done a great deal to maintain our financial prestige and raise it to a height at which it never stood before. When the war began we were expected to finance the Allies, to keep the seas clear and put a small Expeditionary Force to support the left flank of the French Army, and to do these things during a contest which was expected by the consensus of expert opinion to last not more than a few months. All these things we accomplished, and we were the only Power at war which did actually accomplish all that it was expected and asked to do. More than that, we also undertook a great task which was not in our programme; we created a great army on a Continental scale, and, at the same time, continued to carry out the other tasks which had been assigned to us. All these things we did, and that we should have done them was evidence of economic strength and adaptability which have astonished the world. To have financed the Allies and ourselves as long as we did would have been comparatively easy if our population could have been left at work to turn out the stuff and services, the provision of which are implied by financing; but for us to have been able to do it and at the same time to improvise an army which is now consistently and regularly beating the Germans is an achievement which will inevitably raise the world's opinion of our economic strength, on which financial prestige is ultimately based.