Certainly, the country is entitled to congratulate itself on this tremendous evidence of elasticity of revenue, and to a certain extent on the effort that it has made in providing this enormous sum of money from the proceeds of taxation and State services. But when this much has been admitted we have to hasten to add that the figures are not nearly so big as they look, and that there is much less "to write home about," as the schoolboy said, than there appears to be at first sight. Those champions of the Government methods of war finance who maintain that we have, during the past year, multiplied the pre-war revenue, of roughly, £200 millions by more than 3-1/2, so arriving at the present revenue of over £700 millions, are not comparing like with like. The statement is perfectly true on paper, and expressed in pounds sterling, but then the pound sterling of to-day is an entirely different article from the pre-war pound sterling. Owing to the system of finance pursued by our Government, and by every other Government now engaged in the war, of providing for a large part of the country's goods by the mere manufacture of new currency and credit, the buying power of the pound sterling has been greatly depreciated. By multiplying the amount of legal tender currency in the shape of Treasury notes, of token currency in the shape of silver and bronze coinage, and of banking currency through the bank deposits which are swollen by the banks' investments in Government securities, the Government has increased the amount of currency passing from hand to hand in the community while, at the same time, the volume of goods to be purchased has not been increased with anything like the same rapidity, and may, in fact, have been, actually decreased. The inevitable result has been a great flood of new money with a greatly depreciated value. Index numbers show a rise of over 100 per cent. in the average prices of commodities during the war. It is, however, perhaps unfair to assume that the buying power of the pound has actually been reduced by a half, but it is certainly safe to say that it has been reduced by a third. Therefore, the revenue raised by the Government during the past year has to be reduced by at least a third before we are justified in comparing our war achievements with the Government's pre-war revenue. If we take one-third off £707 millions it reduces the total raised during the past year by revenue to about £470 millions, less than two and a half times the pre-war revenue.