Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1929. STILL "SEEING IT THROUGH"

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 117, 13 November 1929, Page 10

Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1929. STILL "SEEING IT THROUGH"

Why is Britain, on visible evidence (e.g., the army of unemployed), more under the influence of post-war depression than are France and Germany? The answer offered to this question by Mr. Wickham Steed in the "American Review of Reviews" is worth quoting:

The nyiin reason is that Great Britain, unlike Prance and Germany, set her face against currency inflation, and at the same time made up her mind to pay her debts. ... While France inflated her currency and was finally obliged to stabilise it at one-fi£th of its former value (thus impoverishing holders of State securities), and while Germany allowed the mark to depreciate until whole classes of her people were ruined, Great Britain returned to the gold standard and preferred to mulct her wealthier citizens by taxation, despite some loss of trade, and to indemnify the workless by the dole rather than allow the foundations of financial stability to be undermined.

Although he does not so express himself, Mr. Steed sees the British nation fighting the gold standard war with the same suffering and fortitude as it fought the 1914-18 War, and with the. same certainty of eventual success. There were times in the middle of 1918—even in the last year of the Great War—when people in high authority in France and in Britain thought that breaking-point had come for the Allies. Then, a couple of weeks later, it was the German front that was cracking, and— hey presto! the month of November brought victory and peace. Who— except those who knew or who were inspired, Foch being both—would have thought it? Mr. Steed foresees a similar breaking of the financial clouds over .Britain. Suddenly the weather will clear, and the ship will sail out on a calm ocean of wellearned peace plus prosperity. Not being an economic Foch, Mr. Steed does not attempt to explain in advance how it will happen. For that matter, Foch did not attempt to explain either; he just waited. Under the Allied standard, one of the darkest hours preceded the dawn; and it may be somewhat similar under the gold standard. Mr. Steed does not pretend to speak definitely on that point, or to say how the regulation of credit according to gold movements must insure success for the hard-pressed standard-bearer. But if economical in reasoning, he is generous in faith. The return to the gold standard was "far-sighted":

No class of the British people has been wholly ruined. Indeed, the general standard of life has risen, though all classes have suffered to some extent. The habit of thought has not been lost. When full prosperity returns, as I am convinced it will return, the nation will be entitled to claim that it came through its post-war ordeal in the same spirit of social solidarity as that which marked its conduct of the War itself. All classes will have borne their share of the burden.

That there would be suffering under the gold standard was known. It was fdreseen and foretold by economists like Mr. J. M. Keynes. But how many realised that more than a decade after the War Mr. Steed would have had to admit such disparity between the internal conditions of Britain on the one hand and of France and Germany on the other, and that Mr. Snowden as Chancellor qf the Exchequer would feel compelled to say that "one-half of the factories and workshops in this country are hopelessly out of date"? How much of this backwardness of the manufacturer is due to the weight lof the taxation accepted in order that [the nation might pay its debts, and how much to the failure of British manufacturers to enter into the new spirit of post-war reconstruction and mass production?

If we read Mr. Steed aright, when he is writing primarily for an American audience, as in this instance, he would be as loth to criticise any fault in the spirit of British manufacturers to-day as he would have been to complain of their munitional failures during the Great War. He would be as loth to criticise the present Mac Donald Labour Government as he would have been to exaggerate any anti-war gesture of Mr. Ramsay Mac Donald in 1914-18. To Mr. Steed the first thing is courage and the united front; only reluctantly will he deal in charges against a class or a section or a party, for fear of adding fuel to sectionalism. And that British spirit is understandable and admirable. But, like everything else, it has its drawbacks. The vice of its virtue is to provide something of a smoke-screen to cover up the old device of muddling through. If a faith in the future involves a religious determination not to inquire into the efficiency or inefficiency of the present, it is just possible that even the future may be imperilled by present (and avoidable) neglects. A trust in Providence is not inconsistent with some insistence on seeing that, in Cromwellian phrase, the industrial powder is dry. Providence helps those who help themselves; if not on the side of the big battalions, it is probably on the side of the efficient ones. So while assurances like Mr. Steed's are welcome, and while one admires the old British 'esprit de corps running.through them, a leaven of reassurance concerning the organisation and initiative of British manufacturing would be even more welcome. Courage may be a static quality, but industrial methods are not. He who is not going forward 13 probably going back. If the spirit informing the mass does not comprehend that truth, one pillar to faith is missing.