The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Attention deficit

From ‘A Plea for Posterity’, The Spectator, 6 March 1915:

A good many people have latterly argued that as posterity will enjoy the advantages of a successful war, so posterity may honourably be left to pay for those advantages in the shape of yearly interest upon a swollen National Debt. This is always the argument of the man who wishes his obligations to be met by other people. If our ancestors had acted upon this principle, the country would never have been free from a crushing burden of Debt, ever increasing with each new war. In the Napoleonic Wars, lasting for over twenty years, burdens of which the present generation has no conception were imposed upon the taxpayer to meet a very large part of the daily cost of the war.

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