A BACKGROUND TO THE NEWS

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 111, 4 February 1935, Page 7

A BACKGROUND TO THE NEWS

American Tariffs The United States Secretary of State, Mr. Cordell Hull, giving evidence before the Senate Agricultural Committee is reported to have said: "We should not furnish protection to every antiquated business firm in the country by an unreasonable high tariff.” The American tariff was originally imposed for the purpose of “fostering infant industries.” “It has been maintained that high tariffs interfere only slightly, if at all, with our export or our import trade,” states President Franklin Roosevelt, “that they are necessary to the success of agriculture and afford essential farm relief; that they do not interfere with the payment of debts to us —that they are absolutely necessary to the economic formula for the aboJL tion of poverty. The experience'of the last four years has unhappily de-, monstrated the error of every single one of these propositions; that every oiie of them has been one of the effective causes of the present depression, and fin) ally that no substantial progress of re; covery from the depression, either here or abroad, can be had without forthright recognition of these errors. I ask effective action to reverse these disl astrous policies. The advocates for protection clamour for a competitive tariff, which means one which will put American producers- on a market equality with the foreign competitors—one that equalises the difference in the cost of production—not a prohibitory tariff back of which producers can combine to practise extortion upon the American public. I appreciate the theory but I know that in practice the theory is utterly disregarded. The rates are imposed in excess of any such differences, looking to the total exclusion of imports—prohibitory rates ” Television.

The British Government, it is stated, is about to give effect to the main recommendations of the Television Committee, and so put this wonderful invention of seeing by wireless on a commercial basis. The inventor of television is a Scotsman, John Logie Baird. Success came his way in October, 1925, when he suddenly saw on the screen of his home-made apparatus the image of a dummy that was in the next room. The principle of Baird’s method of transmission and reception is as follows: The light reflected from the scene to be televised is collected by means of a lens—just as when focusing a camera. This light is focused upon a light-sensitive cell. Interposed between the cell and the lens are three rapidly revolving discs. The first, bearing a number of round lenses in staggered formation, revolves at a rate of 800 revolutions per minute, and breaks up the image into strips. The second is provided with a large number of radial slots and revolves about 4000 times per minute, further cutting up the light-ray. The. third disc has a spiral slot and revolves more slowly. The combined, effect of these discs is to cause the whole of the image to fall on the light sensitive cell in a quick continuous chain of tiny areas of varying brilliance in one-tenth, of a second. The cell transforms these rapid variations, which are transmitted to the receiving apparatus by wire or wireless after being amplified. At the receiver the apparatus is somewhat on the lines of that used by the transmitter, although in a rather simplified form. The incoming varying current causes the light to vary in a corresponding manner to the variations of the cell at the transmitter ; the discs break up the light and throw it-on the screen reconstructing the scene. The Ashantis.

The “Golden Stool” which the natives believe came from Heaven, has been restored, to the Ahhantis with barbaric pageantry. The Ashantis occupy, a district of the Gold Coast Colony of West-Africa, consisting largely of forest land. The country is hilly, and, on the whole, unhealthy. The Ashantis were a weak slave race, raided from the north by negroids for dispatch to Moslem countries, and harried on the east by Dahomey slave hunters and sold to Christians for American plantations. At the beginning of the eighteenth century they produced a fetish king of genius who organised all the tribesmen for war and bought cannon from the Dutch. In 1719 he overthrew the northern negroid kingdom of Denkjera, and his successors met and broke several armies of mounted Sudanese and took over the slave trade. The hunted became the hunters, and the scourge of West Africa. As fetish superstition was the source of the moral strength of the negro nation in arms, it was developed by the fetish king to an extreme degree. His capital of Kumasi, a collection of wattle and clay huts, picturesque arcades and palm-leaf thatched temples, rose into terrifying fame as a holy city of human sacrifices. When the king held more slaves than the European traders could ship, he seldom went to the expense of feeding them until they coujd be sold. Tando, the god of Ashanti, was appeased by their blood. 1 . Through attacking the Fantis who stood in their pathway to direct trade on the coast, the Ashantis came into violent contact with' the British, and were thoroughly overcome by a British expedition in 1900. Fetish, however, remains the spring of general life in this nation of fighting men, and the magic golden stool from which the fetish king is supposed by his subjects to have derived a kind of divine power is a mysterious and dangerous object. Reconstruction Finance Corporation. President Roosevelt has signed a Bill extending the life of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation for two years. This corporation was organised on February 2, 1932. It was authorised to aid in financing agriculture, commerce and , industry, including facilitating the exportation of agricultural and other products by making loans to any bank, savings bank, trust comany, building and loan association, insurance company, mortgage loan company, credit union, and in fact almost every organisation that of itself was in the habit of lending out money on adequate security. Banks and trust companies are the largest class of borrowers. The loans must be “fully and adequately secured.” The magnitude of the business done may be seen from the fact that from February 2. 1932. to November 28. 1933, the corporation lent 3.543,913.392 dollars, and was repaid 986,844,214 dollars.