ABSTRACT
THE gross liabilities of the State (what we generally call the National Debt) amounted on the 31st of March, 1913, to £716,288,421, and a year later to £707,654,110. The debt is due mainly to war. In 1899 it was only £635 m. Four years later, after the Transvaal War, it exceeded £798 m. It was steadily reduced in the next eleven years by £91 m., but has now, thanks to the Great War, soared into figures of astronomical magnitude.
