State can alter or destroy.

The owner and the creditor have never had any other power to give or
withhold credit than the credit that was given to them. They exist by
sufferance or superstition and not of necessity.

It is the habit of overlooking this little flaw in the imperatives of
ownership that enables people to say that this war cannot go on beyond
such and such a date--the end of 1916 is much in favour just
now--because we cannot pay for it. It would be about as reasonable to
expect a battle to end because a landlord had ordered the soldiers off
his estate. So long as there are men to fight and stuff to fight with
the war can go on. There is bankruptcy, but the bankruptcy of States is
not like the bankruptcy of individuals. There is no such thing among
States as an undischarged bankrupt who is forbidden to carry on. A State
may keep on going bankrupt indefinitely and still carry on. It will be
the next step in our prophetic exercise to examine the differences
between State bankruptcy and the bankruptcy of a subject of the State.

The belligerent Powers are approaching a phase when they will no longer
be paying anything like twenty shillings in the pound. In a very
definite sense they are not paying twenty shillings in the pound now.
That is not going to stop the war, but it involves a string of
consequences and possibilities of the utmost importance to our problem
of what is coming when the war is over.

The exhaustion that will bring this war to its end at last is a process
of destruction of men and material. The process of bankruptcy that is
also going on is nothing of the sort. Bankruptcy destroys no concrete
thing; it merely writes off a debt; it destroys a financial but not an