Excerpt from An Empire in Pawn: Being Lectures and Essays on Indian, Colonial, and Domestic Finance, "Preference," Free Trade Etc Nor are national and local debts by any means all the story. If to these we add the debts contracted by the railway companies through debenture issues, guarantees of rent and so on, together with the debts of industrial undertakings of all kinds and other busi ness obligations, it will be found that the most recent total of the ever-growing load upon the industry of the people of this country is not far short of sterling. At an average of 3 per cent. This would mean a year that the British and Irish peoples would have to provide for the satisfaction of the demands of mortgagees before they could buy bread for themselves, and before dividends could be earned on any company's share capital. In actual fact results do not work out in quite this Clean-cut style. It is none the less true that under conditions thus indicated perpetual suction of the people's earnings goes on, whereby the wealth of the minority tends to increase at the expense of the many. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.