vii REMEDIES 263

else as well. As regards internal debt, I am one ofthose who believe that a capital levy for the extinctionof debt is an absolute pre-requisite of sound financein every one of the European belligerent countries.But the continuance on a huge scale of indebted-ness between Governments has special dangers ofits own.

Before the middle of the nineteenth century nonation owed payments to a foreign nation on anyconsiderable scale, except such tributes as were exactedunder the compulsion of actual occupation in forceand, at one time, by absentee princes under thesanctions of feudalism. It is true that the need forEuropean capitalism to find an outlet in the NewWorld has led during the past fifty years, thougheven now on a relatively modest scale, to suchcountries as Argentine owing an annual sum to suchcountries as England. But the system is fragile;and it has only survived because its burden on thepaying countries has not so far been oppressive,because this burden is represented by real assets andis bound up with the property system generally,and because the sums already lent are not undulylarge in relation to those which it is still hopedto borrow. Bankers are used to this system, andbelieve it to be a necessary part of the permanentorder of society. They are disposed to believe, there-fore, by analogy with it, that a comparable systembetween Governments, on a far vaster and definitely