THE SLUMP IN EUROPE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 21, 26 January 1933, Page 6

THE SLUMP IN EUROPE.

HOPE AMID INDUSTRIAL CHAOS.

"I wanted to meet the slump face to face. I wanted to see it in terms of bread and butter or bread and. no butter." So writes H. Hessell Tiltman, a London Journalist, and a well-known authority upon international affairs, who travelled GOOO miles through stricken Europe, stood in ten "dole" queues, and walked through the desolation of dozens of deserted factories. 1 He began with Germany, that proud nation, now, more than any other country, laid low by the depression. In Hamburg lie found the vast shipyards working only 25 per cent of capacity. More than 200,000 of Hamburg's 755,000 workers are totally unemployed, and most of the others are working only part time. Consequently thousands of families cannot aspire to more than a single room, while many of the model flats and houses, built at great expense with the aid of foreign capital, remain unoccupied. In Berlin ilie found that hundreds of thousands were living on a dole of 14/ a week for a married couple, with 3/ a week allowance for each child. Armed with parcels of food, he visited several tenement bouses. He saw appalling overcrowding. But everything was clean —-'miraculously clean considering the price of soap. He saw hunger. He saw rags —for a workless German would have to offend against public decency before the welfare centres would admit that his clothes were in need of replacement. But, worst of all, he, saw despair. The women were, as a whole, more spirited than the men. Man finds sustained periods of inactivity unbearable. Worry gives place to hopelessness until, finally, health and morale are shattered. To Mr. Tiltman, the poverty of these Berlin unemployed seemed a more terrible thing than anything he had seen in Soviet Russia, where the workers are sustained in their privations by hope. False, indeed, that hope niay ! be, but at least it nourishes the spirit. In Denmark a keg of butter realises only half its price of four years iago. This comparison reveals something of what the catastrophic fall in world prices means to the peasant homes in Denmark's green and pleasant valleys. Thirty per cent of Denmark's industrial workers are unemployed. About 100,000 are dependent upon unemployment benefit, which averages 3/3 a day for a married man and 4/4 for a married couple with two children. Yet '■ nowhere is there the despair which is driving Germany to Hitlerism and Communism. The mass of the population still work from dawn till dark on their small holdings producing Britain's breakfast. Czecho-Slovakia sells almost everything and sells it cheaply. The slump has resulted in the inevitable tale of unemployment and distress, but the cost of living is so low that the Czechs, as a whole, are still a well-fed, well-housed and happy people. Zlin, the headquarters of the great Bata organisation, still turns out its 200,000 pairs of boots a day. It is a town which the slump .lias forgotten. Mr. Tiltman attributes its unique immunity from the depression to the Bata system of working, which aims at high production and cheap prices by means of saving split seconds. In Belgium, Holland, and even Switzerland, most favoured of countries, Mr. Tiltman found that the slump had left a track of devastation. Austria is so far gone in, bankruptcy that the first remark the traveller hears is, "Please do not speak of the crisis." Fascist Italy, despite the disclaimers of the Government, is faring little better than her neighbours. Wages, always lower, are poorer than ever. The plight of the peasant can be guessed at from the significant fact that the population is beginning to "forsake white bread for a maize diet, This is responsible for the recrudescence of a disease known as pellagra, which, though rife in the nineteenth century, was almost unknown to th© present generation. Of all the countries which Mr. Tiltman visited, France alone would appear to be slump-proof. There is no real privation in the countryside, and industry, though not so busy as last year, has still sufficient work for most of its employees. It cannot be disguised that the winter will be a grfm one for Europe-r—perhaps the worst for . a hundred years. Comimlnism is declining, contrary to all expectation. Hardship has led people . to see that the way of 1 salvation lies not in extremes but in moderation. The world's hopes are fixed upon the recent! improvement in com- • modity prices. Should this rise prove genuine , and sustained it will "bring relief to •millions of . small homes all the world over —homes engulfed : in a crisis which their humble occupants can neither fight against nor understand."