OVERSEAS OPINIONS

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 171, 15 April 1933, Page 16

OVERSEAS OPINIONS

The Team Spirit. “There is a type of managing director who is strongly opposed to any committees, .or any attempt to bring together the staff beneath him to help in the management,” writes Mr. 11. M. Langton in .‘'The Times Trade and Engineering Supplement.” ‘'The policy of his company lies in his own hands, and as he directs it so it will function; but in the lower ranks of his organisation there is, without doubt, much experience, much knowledge, and almost always a fund of goodwill available, and it is surely a- pity if no benefit is obtained from this unappreciated team spirit, ready and eager enough to be of. use if given an opportunity to show what it can do.”

The Disappointed Man. “There are two types of disappointed men in this world. There are the folk who do not get—they are disappointed ; and .there are the folk who do get, and they are the more disappointed, for they are robbed of hope. The real test comes when you have got the world, even on good terms; when you have not sold your soul; because if you sell your soul to the world you are apt to get n certain indigestion which misleads you into thinking it is fulness. If you get the world on clean terms, it is then that you sit at the table of life and dish .after dish comes and you eat and enjoy it.”— Rev. Arthur Hird, in “The Test of Discipleship.” The Remedy for Slums.

"Granted that there is a residuum of the population which will, if allowed to do so, make any house a pigsty and destroy the amenities of any neighbourhood; it is yet true that the great majority of those who are now obliged to live in ‘slum’ houses are neither wastrels nor criminals, but as good citizens as the rest of us,” writes Sir Austen Chamberlain in the "Daily Telegraph.” Their efforts to make the best of their miserable homes are pathetic. Give them good manageineut and decent houses and they will keep them ddcent. Good management is half the battle. Without it. new Slums are in constant process of creation.”

Gold. S “Our root trouble,” says Dr. Robert ipisler, the Austrian economist, "is the •apparently ineradicable belief in the inherent stability of a currency based <>n gold. Bankers, Treasury officials, statesmen, and Parliamentary electors, fill have the idea that it is possible to Establish a.constant measure of economic value by taking as standard the legally—or, as they suppose, automatically—stabilised price of some tangible ‘intrinsically valuable’ commodity. Actually, of course, the purchase power of gold is not stable, either within a particular country or within the wider sphere of the world trade. • But neither the man in the street nor the average banker notices this until the appreciation or depreciation of money is so great as to force it on his attention. Practical businessmen keep their eyes riveted as long as possible on the commodity side of their ledgers lind firmly believe that the price-level Is falling or rising/in consequence of On alteration in the demand or supply of goods; it does not occur to them that money may also be an unstable factor.”

Economics and Ethics. J. ‘‘Political controversialists have iigreed .that there is some ethical impropriety in estate duties, still more in capital levies, which they brand alike as ‘confiscatory.’ Such moral questions are not for the economist to decide, but it is open to him to point out that economically all taxation is confiscation, or none of it (says a writer). The economic machine produces for a ifian a certain income or a certain capital: the political machine takes it away and gives it to someone else. Economic forces determine that the lirice of a certain article shall be so iniicl): political forces, operating either directly or through restraint laid upon economic forces, determine that it shall be so much more or so much less. .Just as the economist is not concerned with the morality of the economic forces, so he can have no opinion, as ah economist, about the morality of the political forceg. These two systems work together to determine the conditions and background of all our lives, acting and reacting upon each other.”—ll. V. Hodson, in ‘'Economies of a Changing World.” The War Debts. : "I trust the American people will not be misled or influenced by the ceaseless stream of foreign propaganda that cancellation of war debts would give this international relief and remedy. . These debts are but a segment of the problem. Their world’s trade importance ip being exaggerated. The American people can well contend that most of the debtor countries have the capacity to raise these annual amounts from their taxpayers, as witness the fact that in most cases payments to us amount to.less than one-third of the military expenditure of each country.”-—Ex-President Hoover. Making Unemployment an Asset. “The nations will some day emerge from their present depression, and then it may be found that those which used their unemployed—even uneconomically as it seemed at the time —to improve their material conditions, to provide better houses, better docks and harbours, to plant forests, reclaim land, establish public utility services, re-equip railways, and so forth, have a gi'eat advantage over those who merely paid out money and let the unemployed remain idle."—Mr. .7. A. Spender, in the ” N e ws-C'li ron I cl e. ” I'ublic Works and Unemployed. ; “Well known is the old doctrinaire ease against public works—that they cost more than they are worth: that, whoa they arc completed, unemployment is swelled again; that the State loses every way in the long run. It sounds precise. It begs the question."’ says the "Observer" (London).- The Treasury, experts have argued as though the nation were free to choose bptween two courses, one good, the other bad. There is no such choice. The only choice is between two difficulties—the ponderous charge of the present system and the chances of a new departure. The State would lose? What is the State losing now? Over £2OO a minute, if you please—the running cost of the passive system of subsidising unemployment without attempt to create assets in return. What could be worse than this? What more negative and helpless? To subsidise idleness at the rate of £1.30,000,000 a year Is orthodox. Heterodox to use the same money for subsidising work.”

To a Great Scientist. “No man of his generation, it is sale to say, exerted so wide an influence as a mediator in the great and troubled field of science and religion, and it is. no doubt, also true to say that no expositor of science had anything like so wide a public. His book, ‘The Study of Animate Nature,’ is certainly one of the most persuasive arguments for the religious interpretation of nature in the language. Whether his way of solving the great problem will endure, time alone can show.. But he certainly advanced its solution, and the whole effect of his work has been in the direction of persuading scientific workers and men of religion that they were working toward the same end and to lead them into fuller sympathy and cooperation. In his gracious personality science and religion were united in such a way as to be prophetic of that future harmony toward which all the deepest thought and best life of the world are moving under the control of God.”—Principal Cairns, writing of the late Sir J. Arthur Thomson, the famous scientist.

The American Collapse. Both the agricultural and the manufacturing industries of the United States were organised for a large and growing export trade. Exports, however, are impossible unless they can find purchasers who can pay for them. The tariff policy; a legacy from the days when America was a debtor not a creditor nation, hindered payment in goods; the shipping policy largely blocked payment in services; and the purchasing countries had been denuded of their stocks of gold, of which an excessive proportion had been drawn into the vaults of the New York banks. So far as foreign customers were able to continue buying from America it was by the loans which they were able to float in the United States. When these loans ceased, and the credits on which they were based were used to finance the orgy of speculation on the Stock Exchange, the export trade both in manufactured goods and in agricultural produce was immediately affected.— “The Times” (London).

The German Tension. The form of government which the German people may choose or tolerate is, of course, their own affair. What does concern this country and other nations is the spirit in which their new Government propose to face their difficulties and their responsibilities—for the Chancellor has made it clear that he and his colleagues intend to remain j in power whatever the outcome of the Reichstag elections. And it must frank-1 ly be admitted that the available indications of their intentions are not re- 1 assuring. In spite of all appearances the Nationalist Ministers may still be able to control their colleagues. But the fact remains that the policy of the Nazi wing of the Government has produced a state of nervous anxiety in .which the most trivial incident may have disastrous consequences; and in the present state of Europe the continuance of this high tension in Berlin must remain a danger to international peace.—“ The Times” (London). The League and Its Powers.

“What precisely is the value of such a report (the League of Nations’ Deport on the Sino-Japanese crisis). It puts on permanent record the facts of the dispute from the League’s point of view and within the framework of the League’s competence to deal with them. It also records the fact that Manehukuo has not so far been recognised by qny other State except Japan; and the League’s ‘opinion’ that such recognition would be incompatible with the resolution of March 11. 1932. That is all. Such are the facts of what the League has done. That is all the League can do. It can record facts, make venom mendations, and encourage conciliation. There can be no question of using force. The issue, of its supernational or merely international competence was settled long ago. A resort to force by the League of Nations would have many results, some tragic, some comic; but, first of all, it would kill the League itself. “Some day the non recognition of Manchuku ■ may count as a factor in the settlement. In the meantime there is only one wise object for Geneva and for ail serious people: to eliminate hatred in the Far East, not to breed it. There must be no anti-Japanese cult. Need the folly of such a cult be even argued?”—“The Observer” (London). Relief Work.

“I am opposed to relief work. What is relief work? Relief work is made work, work with no purpose, work with no profit. You ought to anticipate the work that ought to be done, that must be done and. sooner or later, will be done if this country is to become healthy, efficient, and prosperous. Do not invent work. Find the work that, sooner or later, you must do. and then utilise the reserves of this country foe the purpose of carrying it out, now. Say to the local authorities, ‘lf you have any scheme for drainage or housing, for every unemployed man who is put to work we will pass the dole on to you towards-his wages.’ They could double the dole in respect of every man put directly on a job, and still there would be an actual saving on the £130,000.000 which they are spending now. They would have to give the local authorities the further encouragement of enabling them to borrow money at the price which the Government was paying. It is not relief work. Yon could judge each scheme as it came before you and no wild-cat scheme would go through.”—My. Lloyd George. British Quality.

“The ’higher grade’ section of the British woollen and worsted trade is subject to little or no foreign competition. Nowhere else in the world are cloths comparable made. All over the world there is a keen appreciation of this fact, and a strong desire to purchase the cloths offered. To state the ease concisely, the ‘higher grade’ section of the British, woollen and worsted industry has, without any outside assistance. obtained such a standard of efficiency as to command world-wide respect and to create a world-wide ‘desire to buy.’ This hard-won position is now seriously jeopardised by the outside interference of foreign tariffs and other trade restrictions, and the object of this memorandum is to Impress upon the authorities that in the t’v.jii/iming negotiations with foreign countries any amelioration of these difficulties that, can be obtained will at once be reflected in an increase of the export figures of this section.”—-From a memorandum published by Ihe British Federation of Woollen Merchants and Shippers