If

should like to know how he has arrived at the conclusion that the capital of the individuals of the nation has risen during the war from 16 to 20 millions. Has he simply added the nominal amount of the gross increase in debt to an estimate of the pre-war value of our capital? If so, has he not omitted to take into account the fall in the prices of securities and in some other forms of property that has taken place during the war's course? And is not the debt a liability of the taxpayers as well as an asset of its holders? Do we really increase the capital of the citizens, as a whole, by pledging their taxable capacity? so, it seems a nice easy way of enriching ourselves. But these are minor details. How could the scheme work? If the individual is to pay in the form that is most convenient, out of his various kinds of property, how long will it take to arrive at a fair valuation of the enormous variety of all kinds of assets that will be thrown at the Government, and by what principle are they to be distributed among the holders of war debt, for the repayment of whom they are to be collected? Will the Treasury open a monstrous lucky bag, into which the debt holders are to dip and take what chance brings them, or how is the thing to be done? However it is done, the system is likely to produce astonishing consequences. If we take the case of a man with a fortune of £100,000, invested before the war in a well-assorted list of securities, the whole of which he has for patriotic reasons converted during the war into war loans, how would he stand? Apparently he will surrender something between 10 and 20 per cent of his holdings. This part of the problem is simple, but in exchange for nearly two-thirds of the rest he may find himself landed with houses and bits of land all over the country, a batch of

unsalable mining shares, a collection of blue china, a pearl necklace, a Chippendale sideboard, and a doubtful Titian.

But Mr. Gardiner, by the time he comes to this part of his scheme, has apparently forgotten about the repayment of debt, because he seems in the latter part of his article to be assuming that the State will keep all the property items which the capitalists of the country are to surrender to it. "If," he says, "Mr. Jones chooses to pay his levy in Great Western railway stock, he to that extent makes the State the owner of the Great Western Railway." But then, if the State is to be owner of a bit of the Great Western Railway, it will not have paid off any debt.

A somewhat similar scheme is suggested in the current Round Table in an article on "Finance After the War," from which the following extract is taken:

The difficulty of applying the method of a levy on capital is probably not so great as appears at first sight. Take, for instance, the case of the United Kingdom. The total capital wealth of the community may be estimated at about 24,000 millions sterling. To pay off a war debt of 3,000 millions sterling would therefore require a levy of one-eighth. Evidently this could not be raised in money, nor would it be necessary. Holders of war loans would pay their proportion in a simple way, by surrendering one-eighth of their scrip. Holders of other forms of property would be assessed for oneeighth of its value and be called on to acquire and to surrender to the State the same amount of War Loan scrip. To do this they would be obliged to realize a part of their property or to mortgage it. But there is no insuperable difficulty about that.

Here we find an estimate of the total capital wealth of the community of 24 thousand millions sterling, showing, by its very great difference from Mr.

Gardiner's how largely these estimates are a matter of fancy. The writer states that the £3,000,000,000 required to pay off war debt, could not be raised in money, but he then proceeds to require holders of all forms of property except war debt, to realize enough to acquire the necessary amount of "War Loan scrip." In other words, an enormous mass of securities and other forms of property would have to be sold or pawned, and turned into money to buy War Loan scrip which their owners would be bound to acquire. Holders of War Loan would incidentally be "on velvet," for they could name any price that they liked for their holdings, which other property-owners would be forced to buy. For by the terms of the prospectus they cannot be repaid, without their consent, before 1929. This fact Mr. Gardiner also seems to have forgotten.

All these schemes for levies on capital and taxation of capital seem to us to be open to grave objections. Any attempt to tax capital means either that property has to be sold, and if everybody is a seller at once, cannot find a buyer, or has to be pawned, so locking up bankers' funds just when they are wanted for industry, and producing more inflation; or else that the tax has to be paid out of the property-owner's current income. In this case, a capital tax is simply an income-tax assessed on property instead of on income, and this form of assessment is not only unfair, because of the difficulty of valuation, but economically bad, because it penalizes those who have acquired property, and consequently have helped the economic progress of

The Economist.

the nation, and lets off those who have spent all that they have earned or received on their own enjoyment, and have not increased the nation's capital fund in peace or helped the nation's finances in war. If, for example, we take the case of two men, both of whom have earned £5,000 a year during the war; one, having spent the whole of it, will not be touched by the capital levy; the other, who has done his patriotic duty, and put large sums into war loans during the course of the war, will find his efforts rewarded by having a slice of his savings taken out of his pocket, while his unpatriotic neighbor will be left free to enjoy the memory of the luxuries and dissipations on which he spent his income.

Moreover, is it not better to tackle the immediate problem first, and try to reform our war finance, so that the rate at which we are piling up debt may be checked? We want a Chancellor of the Exchequer who will have time to attend to the duties of his office, and to make the Treasury direct the brilliant abilities that it commands to a thought-out scheme looking far ahead, instead of continuing along the line of fatalistic drift and financing through inflation. The Chancellor announced recently that "without the aid of the United States the financial position of the Allies would have been in a very disastrous situation today." No more damning comment could have been uttered on the financial policy of himself and his predecessors, which has allowed this country's economic resources to be criminally wasted by public and private extravagance, in the face of the greatest crisis in the world's history.

The "Human Religion," the establishment and extension of which Claude M. Johnson advocates, in a small book bearing that title (Charles Mercer, Publisher), is to be a religion without a personal God, without a Bible, without a hope of immortality,

-a religion devoted altogether to enhancing the value of the present life. The author finds Christianity a failure, its teachings fallacious, its results mischievous; it "cheapens real human life by making it a means of acquiring a supposed spiritual life" and its faith in immortality is "a superstitious belief in a future, unnatural, immortal life"; what is needed is a gospel founded on natural laws which will educate the inhabitants of the world "to live their natural lives to the best advantage and to maintain permanent peace among nations." The scope and aims of this "human religion" are briefly outlined in a new Ten Commandments; and, in particular, the author urges modifications of marriage laws, the establishment of Courts of Conciliation to which unhappy wives or husbands could go for counsel, maintenance of public homes open to universal, but not compulsory, use for the care and training of children.

and the

Daintily printed, and decorated with illustrations by the author, Harold Speakman's "Songs of Hope" (Thomas Y. Crowell Co.) conveys a message of faith and cheer in the ten brief poems which are grouped in it, of which the following "To Pain" is a good specimen:

"You came to me with solemn, swathed brow,

Brooding above me, till the day and night

Whirled into one, beneath the bitter blight

Of your pale garment and I knew not how

To suffer more. Then, from the torture place

As one who fears no sterner, harsher end

Calmly I turned, and looked into your face

And knew you then-Interpreter and Friend."

American readers who chance to pick up Raymond Blathwayt's impressive volume "Through Life and Round the World" (E. P. Dutton & Co.) may well enough wonder why a man of whom few of them have ever heard should think it worth while to offer to the world more than four hundred octavo pages of autobiography. But their wonder will be over before they have finished the first chapter, and the chances are that they will read the book through to the end; for the author has had a great variety of diverting experiences, which he describes most entertainingly, he has traveled in many lands of which he gives vivid pictures, and he has met on intimate terms some of the best-known artists, poets and writers in England and America, about whom he writes with candor, appreciation and humor. Beginning his active life as curate in an East London parish, from which he was dismissed because, on a written examination, he could not enumerate the ten plagues of Egypt in their order, and embarking upon a successful career as a journalist, which carried him to all parts of the world, he had many opportunities to study different sorts of human nature, and, being possessed of a good memory and a keen pen, he has used these opportunities to good advantage. Mor

timer Menpes contributes half а dozen illustrations.

Arthur Stanwood Pier's "The Plattsburgers" (Houghton Mifflin Co.) which was first published serially in the Youth's Companion, is a story of life at the famous camp in the earlier days, when the boys who went there for training had no expectation that a real call to arms would come to them. It is a vivid and stirring story, by a writer who has a keen understanding of boy character, and is able to make his boys real as few writers of the present day can. There are four illustrations by Norman Rockwell.

In "The Reconstruction of Poland and the Near East" Herbert Adams Gibbons, author of "The New Map of Europe" discusses one of the most poignant and pressing of the postbellum problems which will engage whatever conference of diplomats assembles to draw the new map of Europe and to adjust the conflicting claims of the great and little Powers. Mr. Gibbons's presentation of this subject is marked by the same force and lucidity which characterized his earlier work. The history of Poland, during the century since its rights were guaranteed by the Congress of Vienna, has been one of persecution and perfidy on the part of the signatory Powers, and it would be hard to determine which of the three, Prussia, Russia, or Austro-Hungary, has been most guilty. Mr. Gibbons reviews this history, trenchantly and illuminatingly, and forecasts the adjustments which must be made if the Poles, sturdy and liberty-loving, are to come to their rights at last. The controlling principle of such adjustments, he insists, must be that formulated by President Wilson in his address to the Senate last January, that "No peace can last or ought to last which does not recognize and

accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples about from potentate to potentate as if they were property." The Century Co.

George Louis Beer, Lecturer in European History at Columbia University, is the author of a thoughtful and thought-compelling discussion of the future relations and joint international obligations of "The English-Speaking Peoples" (The Macmillan Co.). In an earlier volume-published ten years ago-Professor Beer suggested that it was easily conceivable that the political evolution of the next centuries might take such a course that the American Revolution would lose the significance now attached to it, and might appear merely as the temporary separation of two kindred peoples. It now seems probable that this change will not wait for centuries. It has been greatly hastened by the war, and by the alliance between Great Britain and the United States in the great fight for liberty, democracy and humanity. It is not likely that the ties thus formed will be soon or easily broken. That they may be strengthened as the years pass is a not unreasonable hope; and the discussion in the present volume of the simultaneous development of nationalism and internationalism among the English-speaking peoples, of the changes which have taken place in American foreign policy, of the conflict between German ambitions and the peace and well-being of England and America, of America's entrance into the war, of the essential unity and economic independence of the English-speaking peoples, and the possibilities of a community of policy in the future is at once illuminating and encouraging. Professor Beer's book deserves a wide and thoughtful reading.