MODERN CONDITIONS

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LIV, Issue 22, 21 March 1933, Page 4

MODERN CONDITIONS

A vigorous protest was made by Sir Ernest Benn, in a letter to the Times against the tendency to appeal to "modern conditions" as an excuse for ignoring the fundamental facts underlying economic well-being. Comparing "conditions" in 1833 with these of today, he wrote: "It was understood that the buyer settles the price, and I for one still cling to ail the implications of that idea. Modern conditions —trade unions, rings, tariffs, quotas, subsidies, managed currencies, hordes of officials, trading agreements, import and export boards —seem powerless to move a buyer who will remain out of the market till he is sure that it is a market and not a bureaucratic spider's web. We used to say 'Nothing adventure nothing have,' and modern conditions expressed in the demoralising slogan 'Safety First' have not altered the essential truth of the older saying, notwithstanding all the efforts of Parliaments and conferences and leagues to take every risk from the shoulders of the individual. Failure is still failure however much it may be co-ordinated or rationalised. Profit was recognised as the essential basis of economic well-being, and the State founded an unexampled national prosperity upon a modest 1/- in the pound. Modern conditions pretend to regard profit as an immoral thing, while the State hopes to get a thousand million a year out of it."