OPERATIONS ABROAD 257

during the war. What we produce as a nation we
shall consume as a nation, subject to the extent that
we financed the war during its course by operations
abroad.

These operations were twofold. We sold to
foreigners part of our holdings of foreign securities,
thereby and to this extent paying for war cost out of
capital—out of the investments made by ourselves
and our forbears in America and elsewhere. Mr
Bonar Law, in a recent interview in the Observer,
stated that we had sent back to the United States
practically the whole of our holdings of American
securities to be sold or pledged as collateral for loans,
"^nd that the value of them was three billion dollars—
£600 millions sterling. Any of them that have only
been pledged can presumably be used to meet the
loans raised as they fall due, and so will lighten our
burden in the matter of repayment. These loans
raised abroad are the second mode of foreign
financing. By it we had raised up to November gth
nearly ^1300 millions, as shown by the Economist's
table, and to that extent we have pledged our future
production and that of our posterity, to meet the
annual service for interest and repayment. On the
other hand, all this sum and more we have (as shown
above) lent to our Allies and Dominions, so that the
ex-Chancellor was well justified in his boast that we
had only borrowed to finance our Allies, and that
we had been self-sufficient for our own war cost.*

In other words, all that we needed for the war we
were able to produce ourselves, or to obtain in

* Budget Speech. Parliamentary Debates, vol. 105, No. 33.