my hands to war and my fingers to fight: My defender in whom I trust: Save me from the hand of strange children whose right hand is a right hand of iniquity: That our sons may grow up as the young plants, and our daughters as the polished corners of the temple: That our garners may be full, that there be no decay, no leading away into captivity, and no complaining in our streets."

Perhaps it was this very struggle and sacrifice, this salvation of God which he had so often experienced, this conviction, which had grown out of experience, of the indefectibility of righteousness, which gave Israel his exalted patriotism and which taught Israel to look upon Sion as the City of Righteousness, the chosen city. However that may be, Israel did attain to a conception of patriotism illuminated by religion which far outshone the patriotism of all other nations upon earth, even of Athens herself, and which pointed the way to that other City "not made with hands" which is the mother of us all-whether it be Plato's Republic or Augustine's City of God, or that ideal England which existed in the hearts of the men who defeated the Armada, and which still lives on in the hearts of those now

fighting the Germans. And, even though the ideal still remains far above us, we can in a sense think without impropriety of England where the Psalmist thought of Sion: "I was glad when they said unto me: We will go into the house of the Lord, our feet The Saturday Review.

shall stand in thy gates, O Jerusalem: Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity in itself: There is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God: God is in the midst of her, therefore shall she not be removed, God shall help her and that right early: The hill of Sion is a fair place, and the joy of the whole earth: O pray for the peace of Jerusalem, they shall prosper that love thee, peace be within thy walls and prosperity within thy palaces; yet because of the house of the Lord our God I will seek to do thee good."

Although that ideal, too, remained far above out of their reach, yet it was not out of their sight, and although the words are the words and outpourings of a few chosen souls extending over many centuries, and although Israel as a people fell away from their ideal, "starting aside like a broken bow," and although with their fine gold was mixed brass and with their silver dross, and they crucified their Redeemer, and their end was that as a nation they were blotted out-still, they made these words so much their own that they became the warp and woof of their religion; they stamped their own impress on them so clearly, and, having done so, they stamped them so indelibly upon the world's consciousness as the message of Israel, that just as Athens is the mother of all those who seek art and beauty, so Sion has become the mother of all those who seek righteousness. And of these two undoubtedly Sion's is the greater and grander ideal.

H. T. Marshall.

To everyone who has had a dog for friend and it is but a poor human life that is without some such friendship-it must often have happened to see that familiar, when he has a bone

for which he finds no immediate use, going with it to a secret corner of field or garden, and there digging a hole and industriously burying it. Thither, on some future and hungry day, he will

repair, will disinter the hidden treasure, and crunch and be content. That is the way of every lucky dog that has the enjoyment and freedom of a country field or garden. But now I, who am a town-dweller for the nonce, own a dog of a kind that some who have no acquaintance with them affect to scorn -a Belgian griffon, a lady, black, but very comely. She is more a dog of the town, and of the lap, than of the country, although she will pursue a cat with amazing fury-so long as that traditional enemy of her kith and kin runs from her. And she, when she has an extra-rational piece of biscuit beyond her immediate needs, will carry it into a corner of the room, or of a chair, and there, with a nose that is so snub as to be of little use for shoveling purposes, and with no material for the shoveling even if her features were never so well adapted to that end, will go through all the performance and ritual of the country dog shoveling back the earth over the buried bone. It is a singular operation to watch because of its comic inadequacy; it calls to mind a performance by Arthur Roberts or some other comedian on the stage going through all the action of playing a game of billiards-but without cue or table or billiard balls. But, beside the comic, this act of the dog has its psychological interest also, for it is quite evident that in so doing the creature is obeying an impulse inherited from ancestors to whom the burying and hiding habit was of value. A point especially to notice is that she is not the least perturbed by the inadequacy of her efforts; she appears quite blissfully unconscious of the fact, which is flagrant to us, that there the piece of biscuit is, obvious to all eyes, the ready prey of the first marauder, or housemaid. She does not worry about that. All that matters to her is that she has gone sedulously and

piously through all the movements to which her inherited impulse has stirred her. She has satisfied that instinctive prompting by mere performance of the acts that it suggests. If its performance had been inhibited, she would have suffered a discomfort which may, likely enough, be the biological beginnings of the conscience sting, for we cannot, without a pang, disobey the inherited promptings. But having done the muscular acts which the excitement of a certain nerve center suggested, her little canine soul becomes at peace. It is nothing to her that all has been of none effect, nor that the biscuit is left manifest to every eye. And conversely we may note that she would have been satisfied with no less than the thorough performance of these rites, although that which we are able to perceive to be the end and purpose of them might have been achieved far more easily. For instance, we might give her a small piece of paper, or, in the case of the country dog, a leaf or board, beneath which she might hide the treasure, either by pushing the treasure under, or by putting the covering over it; but neither of these expedients would serve her, though they would hide the biscuit perfectly. She is satisfied by the act that her ancestors have bequeathed to her as the tradition of her race, though it utterly fails to accomplish its end; the far simpler act, which would accomplish the end perfectly, would not suffice her at all, just because it gives no gratification to that age-long canine impulse.

It is a habit which is the more interesting because we may see in it the first beginnings of ownership in property. The idea of propertythat a man should be at least the owner of a suit of clothes, of the price of a dinner, or of a 'bus-fare-has become so familiar that the idea of a life in which he had no belongings at all is a

difficult one for us to form. Nevertheless, there can be no question but that property, proprietorship, is relatively a late product of evolution. By which of the creatures it was first developed may be in some doubt, but we should probably give that first prize to the "little folk" whom Solomon selects as his illustration of thrifty ways the ant that lays up her food in due season. It is true that there is no variety of our native ants that does just this. They have the hibernation habit, which dispenses with the need of a winter food supply. But they have their property, none the less, in what have been called their cattle-the aphides and nature has arranged things so kindly for them that the aphides appear to fall into the winter suspension of their vital faculties and needs at just the same temperature as the ants, their keepers. Other classic exhibitors of the hoarding habit are the corvine birds, such as the jackdaw (the unfortunate penitent of Reims is the historical instance in point), the magpie, rook, etc. Just as I write comes a letter from a correspondent, saying that he has been watching "a crow"-but more likely the bird was a rook-burying a large crust of bread in the midst of the unseasonable snow of April, 1917. It The Westminster Gazette.

"proceeded to dig through the layer of snow with its beak; it then placed the bread in the hole, covered it over with snow, and before flying away looked around in all directions." My correspondent admits that, though he is not aware of it, this may be a habit of "crows and other birds." It is, in fact, a habit of most of the birds of the crow kind. And, for my own part, though I have often watched rooks burying food-not under snow, but in the earth, just as a dog does-I have never seen one come back to unearth its treasure. But then it is more than likely that I did not get up early enough for the watching; because rooks, like most birds, enjoy their breakfast more than any other meal, and commence it very early in the morning. This same correspondent writes that he is aware of the butcher bird's larder; but it is not quite clear whether the shrike's thorn tree, with its wretchedly impaled bumbles and beetles is primarily a storehouse, or whether the bird, not having the strength of talon of the true predatory species, uses the transfixing thorn as a firm attachment to pull against and so rend its prey into mouthfuls. Incidentally, at all events, the purpose of a larder is achieved, whether this or the other was the original use.

Horace Hutchinson.

In a paper read before the Statistical Society on the Statistical Aspects of Inflation, Professor Shield Nicholson gave an exhaustive examination of the "abnormal growth in the various kinds of currency as compared with the pre-war rates of increase," together with the "abnormal rise in the prices of all the groups of commodities used for index numbers," showing that the aggregate index numbers

...

have doubled. He stated that the "root cause of the inflation has no doubt been the great expansion of governmental credit. . . . The growth of bank deposits does not mean increased savings, but increased credit advances." He added that "it is not convenient in a statistical paper to point the moral as if it were a sermon," but concluded that "even in war time the same causes are likely to produce

the same effects. If the inflation of currency continues, the rise of prices I will also continue." This eminent economic authority, after a patient and laborious investigation of cause and effect, thus endorses the views at which we have been so ruthlessly hammering since we first called attention to it in the Economist of September 9, 1916. We make no apology for continuing to bark up this rather unattractive tree, because we believe that the matter is of the highest possible importance to our war finance, to the spirit of the people, and to our after-war problems.

Financing the war by inflation, as we have repeatedly shown, increases the cost of war, makes the Government borrow in depreciated currency sums that it will some day repay in money which, we may hope, will have returned to a more normal level of buying power, throws the cost of war on those least able to bear it by putting what amounts to an indirect tax of something like 100 per cent on many articles of common use, so produces a bad spirit in the country which is full of suspicions of profiteering, turns the exchanges against us, and so faces us with a serious problem on the day when the submarine no longer protects our gold store by raising the cost of shipping gold. The system is so foolish and so unjust that it could only be described as criminal if it were deliberate. It is not, of course, deliberate, but has been drifted into owing to the dilatory slackness with which our war finance has been throughout conducted, culminating in Mr. Bonar Law's Budget with its fresh taxation and borrowing in much the same proportion as Falstaff's halfpennyworth of bread to "an intolerable deal of sack." It arises simply because the Government, not having the courage to tax us as we ought to be taxed at such a time, or the energy to take continuous toll

of our consuming power by effective appeals to us to save, limps along the line of least resistance by inducing the Bank of England and the other banks to create credits for it against Ways and Means Advances, Treasury bills, and other securities that it plants on them. Thus it has developed a convenient system of temporary financing, that was used with good effect in peace time, into an engine of currency debasement, with all its evils and inequities.

It is high time that this process was stopped, and we note with satisfaction the growing appreciation of its evils and dangers in the City and in the country. The fact that all other warring Governments are using it is by no means a conclusive argument in its favor. Finance ought to be our strong point, and is so strong that we weaken it by stupid misuse of it. We can only finance the war by putting our whole productive power, beyond what is necessary to maintain us in health, at the disposal of the fighters on whom we depend for victory. When we think of what they are doing for us, it is a small thing to ask that we should give up the amenities of our sheltered life to provide them with what they need in order to win a complete and well-founded peace. And yet millions of us continue to waste money on things that we ought gladly to go without, to save mankind from а nightmare of devastation. The easiest way for the Government to make us do so is by continuing to debase the currency by fresh creations of blank credits and paper money, so reducing our buying power; but that easy way carries with it evils that have already been enumerated. The sound way for the Government to concentrate our resources on the war is by taking our money, above what is needed for life and health, through taxation or through effective appeals to us to lend it, or if these fail by forced loans.

A letter from one of our readers expresses a "feeling of bewilderment" because we have maintained that taxation should be higher. If our correspondents had been good enough to read us in the past they would have expressed no such surprise. From October 28th, when we discussed the matter in an article entitled "All Our Wealth," until the production of a pitiful Budget, accepted without protest by the leaders of the Opposition, shattered hope for the time being, we have hammered at the need for more taxation with all the wearisome persistence that we have applied to the question of inflation. Taxes big and little, direct and indirect, we have discussed, but always with most emphasis on a much more drastic use of income-tax as the fairest and most efficient tax when once it is purged (as it could be) of the hardship that it inflicts on fathers of families. As to our correspondents' contention with regard to the excess profits tax, the result of which is that "there is really no inducement for us to continue doing business," we can only ask them whether this is the spirit with which such a war can be won? Thousands of men and women all over the country are doing war work for nothing; probably our correspondents are themselves doing so in their leisure hours; but they feel "no inducement" to do work on which the country's financial position so much depends—namely, promoting its export trade-because on a transaction involving £500 their profit is reduced by war taxation to £38. This spirit among our organizers of industry is illustrated and shown to be more widely extended by an interesting passage in the speech on June 13th of the chairman of Pease and Partners, as reported in the Statist:-*

It seems to be almost a part of human nature to consider that it is legitimate

to get the maximum payment out of the Government for the minimum amount of work, and I am sure this feeling, consciously or unconsciously, permeates the vast majority of people connected with trade and many of the workmen as well. As proving what I say, in the settlement of local wages questions it is constantly urged by the workmen, "it does not matter to you, the Government are paying," and this idea really does make it much more difficult to obtain a reasonable settlement. Further, a workmen's delegate at one of our controlled works seriously contended that men were not expected to do the same amount of work in war time. In other trades I am told it has almost been a recognized practise that men on Government work should do less than when they were on private contract orders. At least one of our managers told me that it seemed far more difficult to keep up full steam since we were controlled than before, and I must honestly confess that I find this general opinion hard to struggle against. It is quite wrong, even in ordinary times, as the Government is really the nation itself, and it is almost criminal to allow ourselves to be affected by this feeling at a time like this, when we must exert ourselves even to breaking point in order to maintain the maximum output efficiently.

Another correspondent is disinclined to save for the war because he has little confidence in the Government's way of spending our money. This is a widely held view, and natural enough in ordinary times. But if we all act on it we shall be beaten. Taxation is the cheapest and simplest way of paying for war or anything else. We think that by doing it out of borrowed money we can make posterity pay its share of the cost of a benefit that it will enjoy. This is largely a delusion. As we showed in an article in the Economist of August 12, 1916, on "Paying for War," war has to be paid for when it happens, and whatever