ABSTRACT
The duty of making this clear belonged pre eminently to Parliament and to the Cabinet, and the individual who should have been the spokesman for both was the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He should have made it plain to every one that the motto should be not ‘^Business as usual,” but “ Nothing as usual, and sacrifice for every one.” The simplest and most effective method of imposing this truth on every one was to increase taxation : as soon as wax on the European scale began it was inevitable that taxation on a corres pondingly vast scale must follow, the only effect of postponing taxation was to make it much heavier in the end, just as the only effect of postponing repairs is to make them much more costly when they are finally effected; indeed the analogy is rather with the omission to stop a leak, because there is not only the larger repair to be done later, but the incalculable damage and loss through the escape of water.
