EMPIRE TRADE

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 108, 9 May 1930, Page 9

EMPIRE TRADE

LOED MELCHETT'S VIEWS

FEELINC IN SOUTH AFRICA

(From "Th« Post's" Representative.) LONDON, 27th March.

Lord Melehett, head of Imperial Chemical Industries, has been in South Africa, combining pleasure and business. In the latter connection he interviewed chambers of commerce, addressed the Inter-Parliamentary Federation in the Legislative Assembly, and meetings at Johannesburg, Durban, East London, and Port Elizabeth, and had discussions with the Prime Minister and other members of tho Government, and with General Smuts.

Now, on his return to London, he says that feeling in South Africa is quito favourable to anything that would tend towards closer trade relations with the Empire.

It was harmful and untrue for people at home to say of Imperial Economic Unity that the Dominions were unwilling to take any steps towards it. Lord Melehett said he expected that of all the Dominions South Africa would have been the most unfavourable, but the general'spirit was quite fa-vourable towards closer trade relations.

Sir Abe Bailey has undertaken tho formation of a South African Imperial Economic Unity Committee, and in view of assurances of support from a number of important industrialists and commercial people, Lord Melehett anticipates the setting up of a useful body.

EMPIRE ECONOMIC UNITY.

The essential difference, Lord Melchett said, between those who, like him, advocated Empire Economic Unity, and those who spoke for Empire Free Trade, was that the latter was understood by most people to mean the abolition of all tariffs between different parts of the Empire. "That," he commented, "would be an enormous step forward, but I feel as a practical person that it cannot be done under present circumstances." After he had swept these misconceptions away he found a desire to get to grips with the problem. Lord Melehett welcomed Mr. Baldwin's pronouncement on the question of Empire trade, and deprecated men sincerely aiming at the same ideal dividing forces on methods aud questions, some of which wero still purely hypothetical. There were large potentialities for development about South Africa, declared Lord Melehett, and the momentary difficulties resulting from the depression in prices of her primary agricultural commodities would disappear when world markets re-estab-lished themselves.