A WAY TO REDUCE THE NATIONAL DEBT. (To THE EDITOR
or THE " SPECTATOR.") Sia,—I write to beg you to use your influence in support of a move- ment that is being started among Northumberland miners. They propose to buy bonds representing War Loan and publicly burn them. Other war stock can, of course, be converted into bonds and then flung into the bonfire. This proposal is financially thoroughly sound. It will help to reduce the National Debt, which will be a very heavy burden to the nation for some years after the war is over. Besides this, a huge National Debt will be a barrier between the rich and the poor. Both classes have given lives freely for the common good. But if after the war very heavy taxes have to be paid for the service of the Debt, and all the interest, except a small fraction, goes into the pockets of the rich, the working classes will feel that the rich have made profit out of the war and that the poor have been enslaved to them. We have rained too much by borrowing and too little by taxation. This movement that is beginning in Northumberland is an effort to redress the balance, by urging English men and women volun- tarily to adopt a better plan, a plan that combines generosity with sound finance. Our present finance is at once mean and [We do not agree. We applaud the motive, but dislike the means. Let the Northumbrian miners subscribe to War Loans but keep their scrip. By doing so they may lay the foundations of what we need so greatly—thrift on the part of our hand-workers. Once let them achieve the saving habit, for habit it is, and make that habit national, and they will have done more for the emanci- pation of the working classes than any of their predecessors is social and economic reform.—En. Spectator.]
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