When all is said and done you find that huge reservoirs of Savings at work form a country's real bulwark. Through investment in small, accessible, and marketable securities a people become independent and therefore more efficient and productive. It mobilises money.
Behind all the spectacular publicity that has swept hundreds of millions of British shillings into safe and profitable employment is a Lesson of Preparedness that America may well heed. It means a form of National Service that is just as vital to the general welfare as physical training for actual conflict. A nation trained to save is a nation equipped to meet the shock of economic crisis which is more potent than the attack of armed forces.
What does it all mean? Simply this: no man can touch the English thrift campaign without seeing in it another evidence of a great nation's grim determination to win, whatever the sacrifice.
The British people at home have come to realise that by personal economy and denial they can serve their country and their cause just as effectively as those who fight amid the blare of battle abroad. They are animated by a New Patriotism that is both practical and self-effacing. It is giving the Englishman generally a higher sense of public devotion: it is making him a better and more productive human unit: it is equipping the nation to meet the drastic economic ordeal of to-morrow.
If this lesson of conservation is heeded after the war and becomes a feature of the permanent British life, then the Great Conflict will almost have been worth its dreadful cost in blood and treasure. He who saves now will not have saved in vain.
VI—The Price of Glory
When John Jones of the U.S.A. puts his thousand dollars into an English, French, Russian or German bond he becomes part and parcel of the mightiest financial structure ever dedicated to a single purpose. He cannot tell how his funds will be used. They may buy a few hundred shells, clothe a thousand soldiers, feed a battalion or build a trench. All he knows is that his mite joins the continuous and colossal stream of expense that makes up the Red Wage of War.
Now if John Jones employs his money in the stock or bond of a railroad, corporation, or public utility enterprise he can find out almost precisely what it does, for it lays down a track, provides new equipment or builds a power house. The investment, in short, represents something that produces more wealth.