general community would be like an automobile when the magneto fails.
Everything would be there and in order, except for the spark of credit
which keeps the engine working.

That is how quite a lot of people seem to imagine national bankruptcy:
as a catastrophic jolt. It is a quite impossible nightmare of cessation.
The reality is the completest contrast. All the belligerent countries of
the world are at the present moment quietly, steadily and progressively
going bankrupt, and the mass of people are not even aware of this
process of insolvency.

An individual when he goes bankrupt is measured by the monetary standard
of the country he is in; he pays five or ten or fifteen or so many
shillings in the pound. A community in debt does something which is in
effect the same, but in appearance rather different. It still pays a
pound, but the purchasing power of the pound has diminished. This is
what is happening all over the world to-day; there is a rise in prices.
This is automatic national bankruptcy; unplanned, though perhaps not
unforeseen. It is not a deliberate State act, but a consequence of the
interruption of communications, the diversion of productive energy, the
increased demand for many necessities by the Government and the general
waste under war conditions.

At the beginning of this war England had a certain national debt; it has
paid off none of that original debt; it has added to it tremendously; so
far as money and bankers' records go it still owes and intends to pay
that original debt; but if you translate the language of £.s.d. into
realities, you will find that in loaves or iron or copper or hours of
toil, or indeed in any reality except gold, it owes now, so far as that
original debt goes, far less than it did at the outset. As the war goes