with equal ease, retort that If honest financiers knew their business
better, they would have long ago made things easier for the ignorant
investor to know whether he was putting his money into genuine
enterprise or throwing it down a sink.

Like all other divagations on the subject of what may happen in the
future, this attempt to forecast has necessarily consisted of "dim
glimpses into the obvious," as the undergraduate said of Jowett's
sermon. All that we can be sure of is this: that if the great
opportunities that will lie open to mankind at the end of the war
are rightly used, if we use its lessons to increase our production,
restrict our frivolous consumption, and put a larger proportion of our
larger production into stimulating production still further, there
ought to be a great increase in the amount of capital available to
supply the great increase which may be expected in the amount of
capital demanded. The fact that the chief nations of the world will
have enormous debts on which to pay interest is not one that need
necessarily terrify us from this point of view. The arranging and
imposition of the taxation necessary for meeting the interest on these
debts will involve very serious political and social questions; but
the payment of this interest need not necessarily diminish production,
and it may probably help in checking consumption. It will not impair
the total wealth of the world as a whole; it will merely affect its
distribution. And since it will mean that a considerable part of the
world's output will, for this reason, be handed over to the holders of
the various Government debts, who, _ex hypothesi_, will be people who
have saved money in the past, it is at least possible that they may
devote a considerable amount of the spin so received to further saving
or increasing the supply of capital available.