DOES POSTERITY PAY?
[To Tat Eritrea or me "Semerma."1
Sla.--3 n IIIIIHNiak8ble fallacy seems to me to underlie your ertiele of August 1101, "Does Posterity bey? fallacy perpetually cropping out and which vitiates Lunch contemporary writing. The cost of the war, should it last till the close or next year, is likely to be eight thousand millions sterling. Our pre-war income was stated, and I believe absurdly overetaled, at Iwo thoneand fire hundred millions. That sum included at least seven knocked millions of duplicate and triplicate CIIITiei-8 it'll of coal, next the steel it was converted to, then the steel watch spritss or armourplate. Yet you seem to held as a sort of financial elide IC.. lion that we can pay four years of oar, ii ST so deride, out of four yeara' income. The fact is a mere money quetatiesi of what the war costs is.quite worthless; it begs that entire question "What is a pound?" Since the war Ilse Index Nitrolwr of Prices has risen from 80 to over 180. Natiotuel Debt is of course a propertion of the essets, not a proportion of the DUMPS of the country-
the farmer a National Debt memo Die bypothecatiou or the sacrifice of bullocks or quarters of wheat or hens' egg.. To other taxpayers it means limber, or coal, or fish, or jute bagging. Het the money quotation of our Debt not increased at all (had we. in other words, borrowed nothing) it is quite clear that, owing to the rise in the price of our bullocks, or Wheat, or fish, DT timber and coal and hens' eggs, the real National DOA. would hare bees redoced by reason of the rise of prices in the ratio of 100 to 89. Eight thounasid millions sterling at pre-war prices would have required to redeem it, say, four thousand million quarters of wheat. To-day less than two thousand million quarters would wipe it out, Now, it is vitally important, in view of our financial future, that Members of Parliament should know enough, when the National Debt comes to he paid oft, not to pay back the farmer the money value of two and a quarter bullocks or three quarters of wheat if when the Debt is being redeemed the present Wee Number of Prices shell have again receded from 180 to 80. Thee has beeq the real and up-to-date method by which Hein time prehistoric posterity and the mortgagor of every earl have beep bled while by usurers in high Places. The redemptEm of %Va.
Debt through giving to the grandson of the investor of to=day three times the amount invested and sacrificed by his grandsire Ans always been the object of that class which fattens on war. Voltaire greatly understated it when he declared that the " art of modern government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can for the benefit of the other third "; he should have written net " taro-thirds" but nine-tenths for the benefit of that ries er and utterly conscienceless minority whirls represents one- tenth, and which during all our previous history has been per- mitted to manipulate currency legislation, asserting that superior train-power which indeed it enjoys.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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