One of the most essential political duties is to initiate and sanction
preparations for war on a scale commensurate with the existing
conditions; to organize them efficiently is the duty of the military
authorities--a duty which belongs in a sense to the sphere of strategy,
since it supplies the machinery with which commanders have to reckon.
Policy and strategy touch in this sphere. Policy has a strategic duty to
perform, since it sanctions preparations for war and defines their limit.

It would, therefore, be a fatal and foolish act of political weakness to
disregard the military and strategic standpoint, and to make the bulk of
the preparations for war dependent on the financial moans momentarily
available. "No expenditure without security," runs the formula in which
this policy clothes itself. It is justified only when the security is
fixed by the expenditure. In a great civilized State it is the duties
which must be fulfilled--as Treitschke, our great historian and national
politician, tells us--that determine the expenditure, and the great
Finance Minister is not the man who balances the national accounts by
sparing the national forces, while renouncing the politically
indispensable outlay, but he who stimulates all the live forces of the
nation to cheerful activity, and so employs them for national ends that
the State revenue suffices to meet the admitted political demands. He
can only attain this purpose if he works in harmony with the Ministers
for Commerce, Agriculture, Industries, and Colonies, in order to break
down the restrictions which cramp the enterprise and energy of the
individual, to make all dead values remunerative, and to create
favourable conditions for profitable business. A great impulse must
thrill the whole productive and financial circles of the State, if the
duties of the present and the future are to be fulfilled.