Throw the Compass Overboard.

In Great Britain that very remarkable man Mr. Philip Snowden, Chancellor of the Exchequer, has allowed social reform expenditure to run to a Budget deficit, but he is credited (11th Feb.) with having blocked the Lloyd George plan for a big developmental loan to deal with unemployment. A deficit is a problem for the Chancellor; a loan is another debt burden for posterity. Mr. Snowden hates debts—most of all the American debt, and constantly gives figures showing that the trans-Atlantic burden is relatively heavier in the case of Britain than in the case of France and Italy. Few will deny that Mr. Snowden is an economist as well as a politician. On the other hand, banker criticism in Britain is being heavily concentrated on Mr. Theodore, and still more on Mr. Lang, for their financial proposals for Australia and New South Wales respectively — proposals branded as uneconomic.