this reason. Future Chancellors of the Exchequer will have a far more difficult task to raise the revenue necessary to meet the enormous charges arising out of the War; and if they have to impose heavy taxation for military purposes the nation will be unable to bear the additional burden of expenditure involved in the great and far-reaching schemes of social reconstruction which the War has made imperative. If nations are to be forced to continue to pay the blood-tax, even on the pre-war scale, it is useless to talk of reform.
But we can be quite certain that warlike expenditure on the pre-war scale, unless measures can be devised to safeguard the security of nations, will not be adequate: if the nations have to organize their resources for future war they will do so in a far more thorough fashion. Conscription will become a permanent system in this country, with all that conscription implies as a drain upon the life-blood of the people; standing armaments will grow ever larger and more costly; industry will be impoverished, and the natural growth of trade will be checked; and indeed civilization itself will collapse under the strain of another war. From these evils there is no escape except by way of a League of Nations, which will guarantee peace and security for all peoples, and leave them free to develop their material and moral resources without the menace of recurrent wars.
But British Labour supports on other grounds the
