Voluntary Savings

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 176, 20 April 1940, Page 15

Voluntary Savings

“Inflation will be dangerous to everybody, and I am strongly opposed to compulsory saving, not only because of its inevitable and unavoidable injustices, but because of the injury it would inflict on what I may call spiritual values.

“If you persuade people to do that sort of thing voluntarily you avoke all that is best in them. After all, it is freedom for which we are fighting, but freedom as we know it in this country is absolutely impossible—and, I think, in any country—unless the people are prepared to exercise selfdenial and self-discipline.

“We have to prove by our voluntary efforts that we are worthy of freedom. For the good of the community as a whole and of every individual in it we have to prevent that rise in prices which will lead to what the Prime Minister has called the ‘vicious spiral’ of wages for ever chasing prices, the end of which can only be inflation.

“And look at the alternatives. Inflation is a dreadful disease; it means suffering for all. “Those, who recall what happened in Germany after the last war need no other proof, while a system of compulsory saving denies the people the exercise of their free will. You say to a man, ‘I am going to take so much from you till the end of the war,’ and

instead of developing all that is best in a man’s character you make him soured and discontented at the very moment when you want all that is best in his moral fibre. “This movement of ours touches things that are vital to the national well-being and forces that are fundamental in the national character.” —Sir Robert Kindersley, Chairman of the National War Savings Committee in a “Sunday Times” interview.