This may be loose thinking, but maybe we are entering on the first economic wat; which will be fought cut with balance sheets and decided en the result of a profit and loss account. We have endured over 150 days of propaganda with a strong leaven of economic battles, waged on the seven seas; and except for the fect that the Deutschland is still afloat and the Bremen has got home, balance sheet looks good.
On the present basis of destruction it would take the Germans sixteen years to do away with our mercantile marine, always assuming their sub-merino fleet remained intact and their mines presented an insoluble problem. But Germany is not entitled to assume that fact any more than we are entitled to assume that the German air force was built up for reconnaissance purposes. This is all I can say on the war, as a war, without asking the permission of the censor, 3 The quotation at the head of these notes is not just an epigram chosen at random. It means something definite in these days of stress, With experience waiting to be made use of, there isno need to make mistakes. I have no right, or intention, to criticize any of our war problems that go beyond the simple crudities of business and industry. So when the charming President of the Board of Trade, in attacking Sir Warren Fisher, sometime Permanent Under-Secretary of the Treasury, for his strictures on controllers and sub-the President of the Board of Trade into anger. There was no question to the inefficiency of -the Civil Service; his point was the unnecessary amount of control imposed on industries which are capable of controlling themselves. The aim of these controllers is apparently to do a good job of preventing more experi-
job. aes people from doing a better Civil Service "Efficiency"
The Civil Service is a great organization which maintains its efficiency through the greater efficiency of those whom it is supposed to regulate. But give the actual job to the Civil Service and you get chaos, for the simple reason that, in every business, in every industry, some one person can always make a decision.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.