MERGING AN EMPIRE.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 307, 28 December 1929, Page 9 (Supplement)

MERGING AN EMPIRE.

the new crusade. ITS fascinating immensities an ameeican viewpoint. The alchemists of old were never more excited by the idea of an elixir of youth than Britain is by the conviction that somewhere lies the key to the magic door through which she can pass from the economic shadows on to the broad and shining prosperity path which America blithely treads.

. she thinks she has found the key— or) rather, a small but enormously powerful group of her national leaders do. It reposes in the minds and the wlils of men. The Empire must be merged. Thus writes C. Patrick Thompson in the "New York Herald Tribune." Accused by the die-hard "Morning Post" of having a large part in the defeat of Baldwin and company, Lord Beaverbrook, tlie Canadian newspaper magnate, vowed that if he were not for Baldwin he at least was for the Empire and Imperial fiscal union; and he announced stentoriously that the regeneration of the Conservative party lies along the one broad road of an economic policy for the Empire. That started a landslide that probably surprised even the optimistic Beaverbrook, an expert in mergers —he made his great fortune in hank and cement mergers, and drew his peerage by way of commission for merging political factions in war time. But he lia'd propounded a method. The mass, he asserted, never got anythin" started, and never would, All great decisive movements are achieved by a crusade carried od by a small group of resolute men animated by the crusading spirit. A crusade must therefore be started, to hammer away inside and outside the political parties until the majority are converted and swung into the movement, which can then be translated by politico-economic action into - the big merger. A Jew, a Scot, and an Englishman immediately joined the Canadian in the van of the new crusade. There were, of course, others (crowds have joined since), but this trio must be mentioned because it represents politico-economic sagacity at its zenith. The Scot is Sir Harry McGowan, architect of the £100,000,000 Imperial Chemical Industries trust and its president, a big business leader with many affiliations with America. The Jew is Lord Melchett, the former Alfred Mond, an industrial statesman who has deep and ramified roots . in industry and finance on both sides of the Atlantic. The Englishman is the Eight Hon. Leopold Stennett Amery, Secretary of State for the Colonies in the. Baldwin Administration, a robust little man who climbs peaks in the Alps and the Rockies for a pastime, and was campaigning: for the Empire merger long before Beaverbrook advanced it as the basis of a new and stirring policy for the defeated Conservatives. The list of notables—not merely names, but men who mean' something and speak for large groups and interests —who have joined the crusade since would fill a page. Of these I will mention only Ben Tillett, the Gompers of British Labour and president of the Trades Union Congress, who, in his presidential address,, recently startled everybody by announcing his adhesion to the merger idea —whereupon the august "Times," which used to think it would be a bull point for England and the Empire if , this particular Labour agitator and organiser were quietly taken away to the Tower of London and there shot, gave him its main news column, the first leader, and its blessing. - Firing the Imagination. What fires the imaginations of the Empire merger crusaders is the fact that the potentialities of a merged Empire far exceed those of the American Union* or an economic federation of Europe. Glance at the high lights:— A land area and a population four times the size of the United States, which means a domestic market at least equal to that of the United States. Then 70 per cent of the world's gold supply, over half the world's cattle and sheep, half its tin, all but 10 per cent of its nickel, a third of its zinc, a fourth of its lead, all but a tenth of its rubber, 80 per cent of its wool, a third of its wheat and two-thirds of its rice, and the > world's biggest mercantile marine. Given these factors, the conception of an Empire organised for production and distribution as the forty-eight States of the United States of America are organised—and as Europe is not organised, but might haxe been if Napoleon had been granted a hundred years of lifeis so compelling that future students of this age will find it hard to understand why the most tremendous efforts were not made to realise it before the end of the third decade of the twentieth century. Empires to-day survive only so long as they serve a gigantic purpose and so long as men like them and want them. The cement that binds them is business plus the defence factor. If the Empire means flourishing trade and money for your pocket, you are for it. If it means you are secured against attack by aggressive neighbours, you are for it. But if it doesn't seem to offer much beyond glory, you are not for it, ; and you vote for secession. A Critical Generation. In England all the old stirring slogans of Empire have decayed. The "thin red line" is at a heavy discount. British boys are not reading with any enthusiasm the stories of the lives of the Empire builders. Astute Imperialist, politi- • cians, the great industrial leaders, the shipping magnates and the shrewdlyadvised Heir to the Throne, have discarded the Victorian and Edwardian brands of Empire propaganda, and go to a modern —Zimmern, the author—for hints on how to put the Empire idea over on a post-war generation which is largely disillusioned, critical, questioning and completely immune to the type of brassy propaganda that set British hearts afire when Rhodes was capturing chunks of Africa. Now, a merger which safely harboured the hard-pressed and hard-up Empire within a tariff wall would enable it to rise on a wave of economic good fortune to new strength, power and riches, and the doubting and questioning would give way to new confidence and pride. Britain used to le the workshop of the world. She thrived on a world trade. But Germany, Japan and the United States just before the war were already pressing her hard in all her foreign markets. That process has been enormously accelerated from a dozen different directions in the po6t-war period. She now finds herself ringed about by competitors who are either snatching from her the world markets which her pioneering forefathers found for her or are themselves producing behind tariff walls the finished goods they used to buy from the island manufacturers.

Eesult —idle men and closed down plants in England. The cotton trade has lost £6,000,000 in a year. The coal and steel trades have lost more than half the capital invested in them. There is no remedy for this state of affairs in a protected insular market. It is too small; besides, export trade is a necessity. No country was ever great without it. Spain, Venice and the Netherlands, once great foreign traders, declined with the decrease of their foreign commerce. The same progressive decline confronts Britain unless she can stimulate her drooping export trade. She cannot embark upon a price-cut-ting war throughout the world. Her workers will not stand that remedy. Half a million operatives have been out in Lancashire because the millowners sought to cut prices of their products abroad, lowering the cost of production by a wage-cut of one-eighth. The gene ral strike of 1926 was the direct resuh, of the coal owners' insistence upon trying a similar cure for their economic ills. Britain cannot increase her exports to Europe, her biggest pre-war market, because everywhere now and high tariff walls keep her out, and she has ■ no regular tariff wall, herself, to use as a bargaining counter. Also, most of the nations she used to supply with finished goods are now producing their own. Oil and hydro-electric plants have cut heavily into the pre-war coal markets. Nobody's Enonomic Child. What is left? The Empire is left. There it lies, nobody's economic child, without any semblance of centralised direction and control, although its assets and potentialities are so vast. Opponents of the merger idea, men with large European interests and little at stake in the colonies, the anti-Im-perialists and the free trade-at-any-price factions, argue against the merger and for a closer understanding with Europe. Two-thirds of the gooffis imported to meet Britain's national needs to-day are from foreign countries, they argue, and only one-third from Empire lands. On the export side Britain last year sold more than hall her goods abroad. Everywhere men's nnnds are being awakened to this empire idea and hope. Masses of working men who hitherto have always thought of imperial preference and tariff reform in terms of politicians' catch-words about dear bread and meat at famine prices, are being worked upon by the leaders of their own class and party. In the movie theatres they see and listen to Jim Thomas talking about "Our great 'eritage, the hempire." So it goes. The Dominions have yet to be consulted. And they are tough nuts. Jim Thomas, the Minister for Employment, brought back one reaction from Canada. He said that wherever he mentioned thb merger idea the answer was a loud laugh. But maybe that is because it is still linked with the name of Lord Beaverbrook, who is not liked in his native country—perhaps because immediately after his celebrated cement merger and retirement to England the price of cement in Canada rose 50 per cent.

South Africa under the present Government is nationalistic and critical of the Empire tie, and would, not come in unless she saw exceptional advantages for herself; and Australia is taking her own industrial line and is disposed to doubt the altruism of the Mother Country. What can the mother island offer the Dominion peoples to induce them to come into this grandiose merger? That, says Lord Melchett, is a matter for negotiations. Such questions arise in every merger, and get settled somehow. "You will never achieve a great object, you will never carry through a great purpose, if you begin with difficulties and begin to consider all the objections before you accept the principle," he says. There you have it in a nutshell. The crusaders want the principle accepted, and seek a round table conference to break the back of the business. The Dominions have necessarily to envisage, before they sit down,' the closing down J of part of their industrial plant as redundant to the existing plant in Britain, the mother island offering com-1 pensation in the form of free entry of | agricultural produce and a tariff against j the foreign farmer. It is a big thing, a very big thing, so big that the sponsors of the merger are wise to call themselves crusaders rather than mere advocates. Where the great crusade is going to take the viscounts, barons, knights and plain misters who have joined it at the rousing cry of Peter-the-Hermit-Beaver-brook, one would be rash to surmise. But anyway, they are on the march.