A curious claim

Writing about the Campaign for Better Transport and the M6 toll, the BBC tells us:

[The CBT] estimated the toll road's operator was losing more than £25m a year, discouraging potential investors. (src)

A curious claim indeed: you don't need to 'estimate' anything. The company's results are available for a quid from Companies House or free from the Macquarie Atlas Roads website (link), and it is these figures which the CBT has used. Or, should I say, misused. (Full disclosure: I made the same mistake just now at Tim Worstall's blog [link], but have subsequently recanted my foolishness.)

The most recent full-year results for Midland Expressway Ltd, whose sole interest is the M6 toll, are for the year ending June '09, and they tell us that full-year earnings for the company were a loss of £26.1mn. Result! But if you drill into the figures, you find the following:

	Revenue/expense (£mn)
Revenue	56.1
Operating costs	7.6
Depreciation	18.8
Operating profit/loss	32.1
Interest paid	58.8
Profit/loss	26.1

Yes, that is what it looks like. The losses are entirely due to interest payments. Evil usurers, charging Midland Expressway far too much interest on loans and driving the poor company into loss-making!

But wait, who are these wicked lenders? Note 6 to the account tells us the chief culprit: Macquarie Motorways Group Ltd, who took some £52.4mn in interest. That is to say, the parent company.

Oh dear. Macquarie have, for reasons of their own, chosen to book the internal transfer of profits from the M6 toll as interest rather than earnings. I don't know why, and don't much care. The operating profit, which tells us what the whole group is earning from the M6 toll, is £32.1mn. Whether that is an attractive rate of profit I could not say without access to figures on the investment put in, and frankly I don't have the heart for it.

I worked through this at some length with a member of the campaign, who commented that while this changes some aspects of the report, they stand by the claim that the M6 toll has not fulfilled its original purpose of reducing congestion.

An editorial puzzle

I can't quite work out how this one sneaked past the Guardian's editorial committee. Perhaps it's because it was written by a third-year politics student at the UEA. But you'll see what I mean when I quote the head and sub-head:

Non-science students don't get much tuition for their money
The disparity between the number of 'contact hours' afforded to arts and science students could be reflected in the fees (src)

Variable fees! In the Guardian! Her argument is not altogether cogent, but she raises some important points.

Firstly, tuition does cost different amounts on different courses. Now, you have to count in items she failed to count in, such as library, laboratory and computer usage; but nevertheless it is pretty clear that some courses subsidise others, and it is almost everyone's reasonable guess that the arts and humanities subsidise the sciences. Providing books doesn't cost that much.

Secondly, graduate employability and average salaries really do vary from course to course and institution to institution. People wibble about education having a value for its own sake and I'm disinclined to demur; nevertheless, a university education does additionally provide real, economic benefits to those who gain the degree. Moreover, it is hard to distinguish the in se benefit between a Maths degree and a History of Art degree, but the employment benefits are obvious. The valuation of those benefits is certainly best done in a system which looks more like a market. (Others wibble about 'wider benefits' to having a degree-educated population. But there are 'wider benefits' to ice cream vans; that's not an argument for taxpayer subsidy of ice cream vans.)

I predict that in a system such as the one I routinely propose here, law and dentistry students would be prepared to pay oodles for their courses, because they will (as a rule) earn oodles. Social work students would be likely to pay far less, and the market price will decrease correspondingly. The system we have, with which I would tinker rather than replacing it wholesale, also makes provision for people who never earn enough to pay off their debt by cancelling it after some time. So someone who takes on charitable legal work, à John Grisham's 'Street Lawyer', would not be unduly disadvantaged.

Of course, the fact that law and dentistry students pay so much more will provide universities with an incentive to expand law and dentistry courses. Not such great news for current lawyers and dentists, I suppose, but better news for those extra graduates who would now get into the professions as a result. I'm feeling bold: another prediction I would make is that the extra graduates would come disproportionately from 'non-traditional' backgrounds. In other words, this market-based expansion of provision would be very likely to widen access and increase social mobility.

Yes, variable fees are a good idea. The best one, probably, for keeping our university sector efficient at teaching students without radically cutting the number of undergraduates. It provides price incentives for the provision of key courses, enforces cost discipline on universities and academics, and makes students think carefully about which degree is going to give them the greatest value.

But I'm still puzzled as to why an undergrad from UEA thinks this, and why the Guardian is running her piece.

When to his hurt he swears, naught changes he?

Crispin Blunt is the most recent in a line of Cabinet ministers to leave his wife (src). Chris Huhne left for his secretary; Blunt has left because he is homosexual and 'wishes to come to terms' with this. I don't particularly want to comment on the sexuality aspect directly, but I do note that our culture is rather Janus-like on at least one aspect of this kind of story: fidelity to promise.

When someone leaves their wife for their secretary, or on the grounds of their sexual orientation, it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who will express any sort of concern at the breaking of the promises which were made. This may be born of an honourable desire not to intrude on private grief. Given the absence of these sentiments apart from the immediate circumstances as well, however, I fear that more often it stems from a widespread view that breaking such an intensely personal, intimate promise is not all that serious.

Contrast that with the disapprobation heaped on the politician who makes a political promise and then breaks it. Although cynics observe that every politician's 'tell' is moving lips, the public does generally express at least a degree of anger at this broken promise. What this communicates is that while we care little about the breaking of promises to other people, we care deeply about breaking promises made to us.

This matters because promises are the basis of human relationships. Without promises, there really would be no such thing as society: no economic relations could withstand the erosion of the contract; no political relations could withstand the destruction of social contract; no personal relations can withstand the erosion of trust between people.

Perhaps if all our human relationships were regulated by law then no such faith in promises would be needed. Perhaps. But you would be hard pressed to describe such a society as, in any sense, 'liberal'. The liberal vision of society, as arising organically from the interactions of free individuals associating as they see fit, depends intrinsically on people basically sticking to their word, and on disapproval (social or legal, as fits) of those who break their promises.

I cannot see how personal promises escape that vision, even if we take the view that they are better left beyond the law's ambit. It is not unfair or unreasonable for us to place expectations on people who make solemn vows together, that they should stick to them even when it hurts. After all, why do they make the promises in front of all of us, if not to ask for us to hold them to those promises?

For that reason — and I only assume, on the balance of probabilities, that this individual exists — I think more praiseworthy and newsworthy to be the MP who has stuck by his wife in spite of his sexual orientation or the attentions of a younger, more attractive woman. For it is more important to be true to your wife than true to yourself, and more important to be true to your word than true to your desires.

I'm not certain this advert really works

Seen at the Zondervan website:

Holy Bible (NIV)
By: Various Authors
Sign up for Zondervan Authortracker to receive notice of Various Authors's new resources, tour dates, promotions, and more. (src)

It can't be my twisted sense of humour alone which finds this amusing. After all, the date of the next tour to be carried out by the Various Authors of the Bible is a rather high-level secret, and they don't really do promotions…

In which Labour learns that too much debt is a Bad Thing

Having failed to learn the dangers of too much debt while in government, Labour is in danger of learning the hard way: too much debt, and you find that you do end up in a situation far tighter than you would like. John Prescott is warning that his party could go bankrupt, according to the BBC (src). The BBC story almost sounds like Labour is going through what the national budget needs: a strong treasurer to stand up to excessive demands for funds from the executive and to say that there is no money left.

But there is one small detail in which the story differs: the size of Labour's debt. The lightweights have accrued a mere £20mn to their own party, while putting the entire nation on the hook for billions. It doesn't seem fair, somehow.

No, banks really don't create money out of thin air

The lunatics are out of the asylum again. An organisation named Call4Reform, which claims to be 'a group of economists, lawyers, engineers, former civil servants, university academics and business people', is arguing for fundamental reform of banking. Fine, fine, fine. So long as they don't base their entire case on a major failure of understanding in economics. Which is precisely what they do…

Let us start with their description of the 'problem':

Every pound or dollar in your bank account was created when someone else went into debt. For every £1 in your account, someone else has to be £1 in debt. (src)

This is fairly simply understood. If you have a pound in your savings account, then the bank owes you a pound. Your asset is their liability: your saving is their debt. The bank pays you interest, albeit not much at present, for having borrowed your money. It then lends this money out to someone else, who pays the bank interest. The bank's aim is to make money on the risk-adjusted turnaround.

The reason we call this 'money creation' is because it creates extra assets and liabilities: the bank and the debtor each receive a pound and pass an IOU to someone. There is still only one overall pound, but there is now three pounds' worth of assets and two pounds' worth of liabilities (in the absence of a reserve requirement which requires banks to lend a proportion of savings less than 100% in which case you would have, say, £2.50 assets and £1.50 of debts in the system). In the absence of reserve requirements, this process can continue forever, constrained only by the rate at which banks can take in savings and write loans.

However, Call4Reform confuses this accounting form of money creation with money creation ex nihilo:

Banks create money when someone goes into debt - through the accounting procedures that they use, every loan they make creates brand new money. (src)

It is easy, if you think about it briefly, to persuade yourself that this flatly contradicts their previous statement. But suppose this latter statement were true. If they really could lend money which they created ex nihilo, what self-respecting banker would pay to borrow someone else's money to lend on? It would be an utterly unnecessary cost. Instead, they would create all the money they needed. Interest rates would be marginal and inflation would be out of control. Bad loans would be no worry, since the banks don't have any creditors to oblige. If banks could create money ex nihilo, then our economy would be wholly different, and our current economic difficulties would look like a walk in the park.

If you misunderstand the way that private-sector 'money creation' occurs, you will end up looking not a little silly. For suppose that the banks really did behave in this ex nihilo fashion. Then the only way to stop this would be to ban banking outright: even with the current vilification of bankers, most people still agree we need a banking system of some sort. On the other hand, if as I have shown banks don't behave this way, and if as they have shown, some very silly people think they do, then you end up proposing redundant solutions.

Guess what? The solution Call4Reform proposes is this:

we just set a ‘universal rule’ that banks can only credit (put money into) an account if they simultaneously debit (take money out of) another account by the same amount. (src)

Which is to say, they want to solve this 'problem' in banking by forcing banks to do exactly what they already do, except that the banks do it with better accounting procedures since they send their savers regularly updated IOUs. There, they've achieved their first aim. Now, can they close the website down?

Wolfram Alpha + finance = money geek attack

Remember Wolfram Alpha? It's gone a little quiet, but I got an email from someone in their technical team yesterday informing me that an issue I had suggested could merit some attention had received it. (My message was dated the 19th of May, 2009, so it has taken them a little while to fix this.) And now, thanks in part to your intrepid correspondent, you can plug in share portfolios easily. And the answers you get out — this was a real annoyance to me — are not in dollars, but in the appropriate local currency.

Here is an example, with 51 Marks shares and 49 National Grid shares (src). There is even a (slightly dubious-looking) Markowitz fronteir calculation at the bottom. I couldn't recommend using it as anything other than a bit of fun. The syntax is still a little ropey: the best way to guarantee UK shares are recognised seems to be to put the Epic in block capitals after 'L:'. I haven't been able to get my iShares to show.

Still, in spite of its continued struggle against the forces of variably reliable syntax and the occasional dubious result from the frontier calculation, it's a rather nifty little thing. All it's missing now is some kind of graphing feature to show the fluctuating total value of the portfolio.

A solution, or evidence of the problem?

On this morning's Today, Lord Baker told the education correspondent that 'dumbing down' (or grade inflation, as we also know it) had been solved by the introduction of the A* grade. Presumably he also think that we would bring inflation under control by the introduction of a £100 note. This point of view is clearly far more reasonable than, for example, taking the introduction of the £100 note as evidence of continued inflation.

Likewise with the A* grade, then: is it the solution to grade inflation, or evidence of the continued inflation of grades?

Channelling Michael Flanders…

While away, I read an interesting article in Saturday's Times about how the Internet is destroying our reading habits, by a chappie called Nicholas Carr. With the Times being behind a paywall, I would point you, if you want to get much the same argument, to a similar article by the same author at the Atlantic's website (src).

His thesis is that we are no longer able to read extended sections of prose or analyse detailed arguments. His preferred form of presentation of this thesis was in an extended section of prose, with detailed argument. So this report may be misleading: I naturally skim-read the first paragraph and then lost interest. According to the Times article, he has also written a book about this. Mind you, I haven't read it. I'm waiting for someone to make a Youtube cartoon out of it [1].

But although there is a bit of a contradiction in declaring modern society incapable of reading extended sections of prose in a two-page newspaper article, I want to take him a little more seriously than that. Nevertheless, I do doubt his thesis. I don't find it significantly more difficult to read paper texts with intent now than I did a few years ago. My job, for the last three or four years, has demanded it and I maintain the ability.

I do, however, agree that reading an article on a computer screen is a different experience from reading the same article on paper. I take more time over the paper than over the screen, a function partly of the inherent undesirability of looking at a constantly-updating screen for prolonged periods. Equally, though, I have been reading ebooks on my monitor and while I only read relatively short sections (for the reason given above), I don't find any great struggle to read them properly, or at least as properly as ever I have done: I skim-read even as a child. Perhaps that accounts for it, but perhaps it doesn't. I tend to find it easier to proceed on the assumption that I'm not altogether abnormal, despite what my loving family will tell me at every available opportunity.

The fact that my bookshelves are stacked and keep growing (whenever I can afford it…) would seem to suggest that being a heavy Internet user does not impair my ability to read books. Or even newspapers, which must be good news for those who want to use newspapers to propagate a warning that we are losing the ability to read newspaper articles.

[1] Apologies to Michael Flanders for brazenly updating his joke for the twenty-first century.

Any Blogger users out there?

I come back from a short break and find five comments on recent posts in Chinese advertising what I presume, having not dared to click, are sites of an 'adult' nature. This happens from time to time. The puzzle is that I have specifically set up this blog to report comments but only one in every ten or so Chinese ones gets sent to me. Do any of my Blogger-using readers find this happens?

The last time, the frequency became unbearable and I disabled commenting by unregistered users, which resolved it. This time, the comments are from named users so I suspect that won't work. In any case, our anonymous and unregistered commenters add value to the discussion, so I'm not willing to remove them in order to deal with this relatively minor problem. But if any Blogger-using readers have experienced this and know an easy way to block the dodgy commenters, or at least to increase the likelihood I get told about them, I'm all ears.

What happens when you release slaves?

Johann Hari, our favourite non-economist and always game for a bit of silliness on economic history, tells us:

After slavery was abolished in 1833, Britain's GDP fell by 10 percent. (src, via)

I assume he means immediately after 1833, rather than at some point after 1833 (e.g., 2009). If you check that then you find that while his specific claim is not only incorrect but almost certainly irrelevant, he does accidentally hit on nearly the correct figures. However, he appears to imply that slavery is good for GDP, which surely must make him almost unique in the Western world. Certainly any good Marxist would want to disagree with him, but so also should any good classical or neo-classical economist.

Before we look at the numbers, let me me explain why theory runs against that conclusion. The whole aim of any economy is that demand can be satisfied. But slaves are not very prolific consumers, so slavery restricts the market which can be served and is thus bad for the economy. Slavery is also a pretty inefficient way to obtain output. Ending slavery would free former slaves to consume more, which would in the long run more than compensate for the loss of output which might occur in the areas in which slaves were previously exploited.

Put another way, I suggest that Hari is committing the old fallacy of equating benefits to certain capitalists with benefits to the economy as a whole. 'What's good for Ford is good for America,' ran the old slogan, but it was never true. In a similar way, though the sugar plantation owners might have 'lost' by not being able to exploit the labour of their fellow-men, the domestic economy would gain by being able to sell to them instead. And what British consumers might 'lose' by not being able to buy cheap sugar should in the long-run be more than compensated by the ability of British industry to export textiles and other products to the former slaves.

Thus runs the theory, but what of the figures? The best figures I could obtain were constructed from records for British Guiana, from 1832–52, and were published in 1972 (src) [1]. Let me set the historical scene briefly, because Johann Hari hasn't even looked at the right place. The Act abolishing slavery was passed in 1833, but the institution of slavery did not pass into history in that year. A six-year 'apprenticing system', shortened to five years through popular pressure, was implemented, so that the time when slavery was abolished was, in fact, 1838–39. And slavery was abolished in Great Britain a lot earlier than 1833: the 1833 Act abolished it in the rest of the empire. So Hari's study of Great Britain's GDP in 1833–34 is completely irrelevant, both geographically and chronologically.

Then let us look at the British Guianese economy from 1832 to 1838, while the apprenticeship system was going on. We find that it was basically stuck: GDP bounced around, going up a bit then down a bit. Sadly, no figures for the period of slavery proper were forthcoming. When slavery was finally done away with, GDP fell by about 10%, but across two years rather than one. Thereafter, the British Guianese economy motored away.

Drilling into the figures, you can see that the chief loser was, as expected, the sugar plantations, which lost a lot of cheap labour. The British Guianese economy's sole export was raw sugar, and they lost over a third of their exports in the two years around emancipation. The average growth in sugar exports from 1838 to 1842 was -9.72%. However, the domestic non-export economy grew in the same period at an average annual rate of 7.72%. The British Guianese economy as a whole soon left behind the one-off shock of releasing its slaves, and entered growth instead of the stagnation it had apparently been suffering earlier [2].

In other words, slavery isn't good for economies. If British Guiana is typical of the British Empire at the time, slavery, or at least the interim apprenticeship system which retained many of its characteristics, slows economies down even as far as stagnation. Releasing slaves causes some economic dislocation — although nothing to compare with the dislocation caused by enslaving people in the first place — but once the slaves are freed, the economy grows more rapidly afterwards.

Curious, isn't it? Freedom works.

[1] This is only one paper, using constructed indices. In other words, this is all heavily-caveated. I am always happy to take other evidence on board, especially if it is a good review article which takes a broad view of the best available studies.
[2] The subsequent history makes very interesting reading. You can see all sorts of themes cropping up: on the positive side, voluntary co-operation and the ability of a liberated market to respond to needs; on the negative side, capture of the authorities by special interests and the pernicious effects of government sale and purchase to regulate wages and prices.

Language, damned language and statistics

The language people use to describe statistics always interests me. I try my hardest to present statistics fairly and in context, but it is sometimes easy to fall into a trap of misrepresenting reality with the words we use. Here is a very mild example of what I'm thinking of, from a recent Demos press release:

The poll also evidences a North/South divide, with more than a third (35%) of voters in the North seeing government as ‘a force for good’, compared with just over one in four (27%) seeing government as ‘part of the problem’ not the solution’. (src)

The quibble, and I emphasise again how mild this is, is with 'more than' and 'just over'. If you work out the difference between 35% and a third, you find that the difference is a shade smaller than the difference between 27% and one in four, although the discrepancy between the two is outweighed by the rounding error. Likewise, the difference as a proportion of the base — for example (35%-33.33…%)/33.33…% — is smaller for the 35% figure than the 27% figure for all except the extremes of the rounding range. In other words, it's not strictly accurate to describe the difference in terms which make it sound as though the margin in the North was further over a third than the margin in the South was over one in four. [As has been pointed out in the comments, it's not the margin in the South: I mis-read the release. The point about language is unaffected by my reading incomprehension.] Yet Demos described the former as 'more than' and the latter as 'just over'.

Again I say, this is a very mild example, and certainly not something to get hot under the collar about. I should think that moaning about Demos misrepresenting their figures on this basis would qualify for Olympic-standard pedantry. But it is a very mild example of something which you can spot far more egregiously at other times: the figures tell one story, but the descriptive language used to frame the figures subtly implies a different one. (Take, for example, yesterday's Independent claim about the Industrial Revolution being 'powered by child slaves': it turned out in the article's body that at most fifteen percent of the output was derived from child labour. And the Industrial Revolution was powered by coal, as any fule kno.)

Often, this is a simple error, but sometimes it seems that it might have been deliberate. Either way, we can discern the truth if we know what the underlying facts are. Perhaps it is time that we expected journalists and commentators, whose aggregated competency to work with numbers is documentably lamentable, to give proper footnoted references. George Monbiot, whose politics I certainly do not share, is an excellent example in this, at least: he provides a footnoted version of his columns at his website. More of that, please, and less of the shoddy, unqualified wordsmanship which masks the subtlety of the numbers with the brute force of verbiage.

Revealed: the Independent's lack of historical awareness

David Keys walks straight into the Journalidiot category with his headline, which reads,

Revealed: Industrial Revolution was powered by child slaves (src)

Which is fine, except for a few minor problems:

1. This is not a new revelation; I knew about child labour in industrial Britain when I was studying the period at GCSE. (Probably my favourite period of history, by the way. Technology, progress, economics… I loved all that.) I suspect that Marx and Engels had a few things to say about children in factories, too: they wouldn't have passed up an opportunity to slate the wicked capitalists for giving families work.
2. It was not simply the Industrial Revolution: children had always worked. It used to be on the farm or in the fields alongside their parents. When the parents moved to the cities to find work in the factories, it became factory work. This is a natural evolution of an existing phenomenon, as the body of the article goes on to note.
3. It was not 'powered': children were a part of the workforce, and as the article goes on to note, only about fifteen percent, and they would have provided less of the output since they are not generally as productive. So they were a significant, contributing minority, but a minority nonetheless.
4. 'Slaves' is pure hyperbole, if not an actual calumny against mill-owners. The children were paid, just like the adults were, and they went out to work through economic necessity rather than at the barrel of a gun. If 'having to work in order to eat' is slavery, then I guess we are all slaves.

So, I think that leaves 'was', 'by' and potentially 'child' as accurate. Nice work there.

This isn't simply a quibble over an idiot journalist's interpretation of history. Nowadays, it is common among left-wing hacks to refer to child labour as slavery when it takes place in the developing world.

Plainly, that children work in factories is not desirable. I do not dispute this; I am not certain many people would. However, the choice is not simplistically between 'working in factories' and 'not working in factories'. (Or even 'in fields', etc.) It is between 'eating' and 'not eating': there are developing countries where children neither work nor eat, and developing countries where children work and eat.

In fact, it is practically a sine qua non of a developed country that children are generally able to eat without working, or equivalently, a good definition of absolute poverty that it is necessary for your children to work in order to eat. The United Kingdom was not, until the latter half of the nineteenth century or possibly even the early part of the twentieth, a developed country by this definition. Hence, children worked in order that the family had enough income to live on.

Nowadays, British children do not have to work in order to eat. The reason that this state of affairs came about was economic growth: parents could earn enough to cover their household necessities without needing the children to work. And the Industrial Revolution was of a significance in that process which cannot be underestimated. So to discover that children during the Industrial Revolution is no surprise. The real news is that the Industrial Revolution ensured that children do not have to work any more. We shouldn't damn the factory owners for employing children, but rather praise them for, ultimately, putting children out of a job!

When we hear about children having to go out to work in developing countries, it is right to be sympathetic. We don't want that to have to happen. But the way that it can be stopped is not by simplistically banning child labour: that is the wrong end of the problem. It takes an unhistorical view, and in fact condemns a country to grinding poverty. Those countries are socially and in some senses economically at a level similar to industrial Britain, and they need to grow economically in order to generate sufficient wealth to be able to afford for the children in them not to have to work.

And all together now, what is the solution for that? Capitalism, free trade, investment, progress… all things which David Keys, in his rush to be a trendy anti-imperialist, seems to want to denigrate.

A non-postmillennial Puritan

Christians have historically held quite a wide variety of views on the second coming of Jesus. Some think that it won't happen at all, but Christians who take the Bible seriously take seriously its clear teaching that this will happen. (The Apostle Peter warned that 'scoffers' would come, scoffing and asking after the promised coming. Whether even he realised at the time that some would be ordained as supposed ministers of the gospel is another matter.)

Some Christians have latched onto the teaching that Jesus will reign, and understand by this an earthly kingdom with a physical throne and Jesus sitting on it, probably in Jerusalem. This is called premillennialism, and premillennialists expect Jesus to return, set up this kingdom and rule for a thousand years before judging everyone in the general resurrection.

Others have taken the view that Jesus will not rule from Jerusalem, but that the whole earth will gradually become Christianised so that his rule is visibly seen across the whole world even as it is heaven. These are, and again there are different strains, postmillennialists.

Sometimes, you hear Reformed postmillennialists claim the entire body of Puritans for their own, as if no other view on Christ's return could be found among them. Postmillennialism was the dominant view, but prominent Puritans did demur. Thomas Watson was a contemporary of the Westminster Divines and wrote a well-received series of sermons expounding its doctrines. In his lovely book on the Sermon on the Mount, he wrote:

There are some who, aspiring after earthly greatness, talk of a temporal reign here: but then God's church on earth would not be militant, but triumphant. But sure it is that the saints shall reign in a glorious manner: 'Theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.' … By the kingdom of heaven is meant that state of glory which the saints shall enjoy when they shall reign with God and the angels forever; sin, hell and death being fully subdued. (src)

The same observation will work for premillennialists, too.

So I stick with the view known as amillennialism, which is I think more common among British evangelicals than people realise. This is that Christ is now reigning from heaven, and we do not need to look for some kind of pre-second-coming second coming nor should we of necessity expect the entire world to be Christianised prior to his coming. His heavenly reign, into which all believers enter when they die, will be established eternally on the earth at the Judgment. Until then, we labour knowing that all things are even now under his feet, and enjoying the certainty that one day we shall see with the eye what we now only perceive by faith.