And yet, perhaps, you will permit me to dwell for a moment upon
the situation they disclose. Enormous loans freely spent in the
stimulation of industry of almost every sort produce inflations and
extravagances which presently make the whole economic structure
questionable and insecure, and the very basis of credit is cut away.
Only fair, equitably distributed taxation of the widest incidents and
drawing chiefly from the sources which would be likely to demoralize
credit by their very abundance can prevent inflation and keep our
industrial system free of speculation and waste. We shall naturally
turn, therefore, I suppose, to war profits and incomes and luxuries for
the additional taxes. But the war profits and incomes upon which the
increased taxes will be levied will be the profits and incomes of the
calendar year 1918. It would be manifestly unfair to wait until the
early months of 1919 to say what they are to be. It might be difficult,
I should imagine, to run the mill with water that had already gone over
the wheel.
Moreover, taxes of that sort will not be paid until June of next year,
and the Treasury must anticipate them. It must use the money they are
to produce before it is due. It must sell short-time certificates of
indebtedness. In the Autumn a much larger sale of long-time bonds must
be effected than has yet been attempted. What are the bankers to think
of the certificates if they do not certainly know where the money is to
come from which is to take them up? and how are investors to approach
the purchase of bonds with any sort of confidence or knowledge of their
own affairs if they do not know what taxes they are to pay and what
economies and adjustments of their business they must effect? I cannot
assure the country of a successful administration of the Treasury in
1918 if the question of further taxation is to be left undecided until
1919.
The consideration that dominates every other now, and makes every
other seem trivial and negligible, is the winning of the war. We are
not only in the midst of the war, we are at the very peak and crisis
of it. Hundreds of thousands of our men, carrying our hearts with them
and our fortunes, are in the field, and ships are crowding faster and
faster to the ports of France and England with regiment after regiment,
thousand after thousand, to join them until the enemy shall be beaten
and brought to a reckoning with mankind. There can be no pause or
intermission. The great enterprise must, on the contrary, be pushed
with greater and greater energy. The volume of our might must steadily
and rapidly be augmented until there can be no question of resisting
it. If that is to be accomplished, gentlemen, money must sustain it
to the utmost. Our financial program must no more be left in doubt or
suffered to lag than our ordnance program or our ship program or our
munition program or our program for making millions of men ready. These
others are not programs, indeed, but mere plans upon paper, unless
there is to be an unquestionable supply of money.