War-time financial problems

AMERICA'S EXPERIENCE 127

country has acquired during the two and a half
years in which it, in the position of a neutral, was
able to sell its produce at highly satisfactory prices
to the warring lowers without itself having to incur
any of the expenses of war. On the other hand, its
great distance from the actual seat of operations will
naturally make it difficult for the American Govern-
ment to impose taxation as freely as might have been
done in the case of peoples which are actually on
the scene of warfare; so that it is hardly safe to
count on American example to improve the standard
of war finance which has been so lamentably low in
Europe in the course of the present war. According
to their original estimates the proportion of war cost
borne out of taxation seems to have been on very
much the same level as ours, and this has all through
the war been very much lower than the results
achieved by our ancestors at the time of the
Napoleonic and Crimean wars.

On this point the proportion of our expenditure,
which has been borne out of revenue, the Chancellor
stated that up to the end of last financial year,
March 31,1918, the proportion of total expenditure
borne out of revenue was 26*3 per cent. On the
estimates which he submitted to the House in his
Budget speech on April 22nd, the proportion of total
expenditure met out of revenue during the current
financial year will be 28*3 per cent., and the pro-
portion calculated over the whole period to the end
of the current year will be 26*9 per cent. These
proportions, however, are between total revenue and
total expenditure during the war period. The