Evening Post. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1933. "NOT A 'FAILURE'"

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 90, 13 October 1933, Page 6

Evening Post. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1933. "NOT A 'FAILURE'"

Some of the remarks attributed to Mr. Forbes when he was in the United States may doubtless be ascribed to the imagination of the American reporters, but when they represented him as saying that the World Monetary and Economic Conference was. "neither a complete success nor a complete failure," there seemed to be no reason for doubting the authenticity of this very safe remark. The first part of it was.indeed so safe as to seem quite unnecessary. Nobody in America or anywhere else was ever in any danger of mistaking the Con» ference for a complete success, unless indeed an exception is to be made of those absolutely lOO.per'Cent. Americans who proved themselves to be more unqualified thproughgoers than Professor MoJey himself, the late leader of the President's "br«in trust," when they welcomed the wreck of the Conference as-emancipating their country from its dependence upon any other. But the position of these superrpatriots of the United States who welcomed the message by which Mr, Roosevelt torpedoed the Conference as "a new Declaration of Independence" was peculiar, They rejected both clauses of Mr. Forbes* platitude. While he said that the Conference was neither a complete success nor a complete failure they said that it was both. The complete shattering of the hopes which the re#t of the world had built upon" the Conference had rid their country of a great encumbrance and set it free to pursue the path of Safety and national recovery alone. But, with the exception of these paradoxical people for whom the complete failure and the complete success.of the World Monetary and Economic Conference were the game thing, there was certainly nobody who could venture to describe it as a complete success except ironically. On the other hand, the description of the Conference as a complete failure might almost be said to have been normal. There had been conferences without number during the fourteen years which had followed the Peace Treaty.. Most of them had failed, and the only noteworthy feature of thig last failure was that it was the most'rapid and the most abject of them all. This general impression was well stated, and supported with chapter and verse, in an article on ''International Cpnferencesj A Retrospect," which was contributed to the '" Manchester Guardian" (Weekly Edition, July 21), by a special correspondent obviously writing with a very intimate knowledge of the subject. Most pf these conferences had, he said, "begun in an atmosphere of real or simulated optimism," struck the first crisis in a week or so,. and at the eleventh hour, when the break-ing-up point feeejtfed to have been reached, patched up some sort of agreement, * The Monetary and Economic Conference, lie continued, began in an atmosphere of'pessimism, and has.not followed the usual eoilrse. It is true thut the crjsis occurred at the normal time, hut it was a fatal crisis, No previous conference has failed so conspicuously and so soon. The Conference opened on June 12,-and before the end.of the month President Roosevelt had'dealt it its death-blow. It will close without having arrived at Seven a, windowdressing .agreement on any important question. A surprising contrast to this generally accepted opinion on the futility of the Economic Conference is pre> sented' by another British authority of good standing, Who could have inferred from the title of Mr, George Glasgow's article in the August; num. ber of the "Fortnightly Review"— "Not a failure'"—that the subject of it is this same Conference which the expert and the politician and the man in the street have been so heartily anathematising? But his defence of the Conference from the charge of failure is a two-edged sword, and before they have reached the end of ; hi§ first paragraph the experts will have discovered and the politicians will at least have begun to suspect that he is a very dangerous advocate, Mr. Glasgow opens with the remark that owe of the, satisfac lory things about the Conference is that after a month of it nobody in the world except some of "the doc* trinaire economists" appeared to be depressed, and out of the disappointment of these economists his wit gets some excellent fun:—The pure economist—by pure ee'oniv mist one means the man or woman who dogmatises1' in.a scholarly spirit about past facts in interpatignaj; commerce and thence deduces present remedies and future probabilHies^was as pure and as depressing as ever, He. said that co-operation between the Governments of the world was essential to the financial and economic welfare of the world. He regretted the "failure" of the World Conference, suggested that it had not been prepared enough in advance, nor intelligently conducted in the event. His own oddity was that he did apparently believe it to be possible that the politicians of sixty-six nations should be collectively effective in a constructive sense. i The politician who infers from the last sentence that he may need

saving from this friend just as badly as the economist will not be disappointed. The second paragraph, which he is allowed to monopolise, begins with the remark that "there was no evidence that the Conference did harm by its failure to agree upon any single matter before it." "Rather," Mr. Glasgow adds, "was it a cause for congratulation that it thus failed." He proceeds to argue that if the politicians of America, Britain, and Fiance had "stabilised" their currencies, many merchants all over the world would have been "assailed by feelings nearer to panic than to pleasure." The merchant, of course, needs stable currencies to work on, but "stable currencies are the result jof stable commercial, conditions," and if the politicians had committed 'themselves'on paper to the counteracting ■of the currency fluctuations arising from the instability of these conditions they .would have been "attempting to do violence to natural cause and effect.'* Such a. commitment he likens to "a political agreement to prevent the advent of next Christmas by stopping all the clocks in the Geological Museum," But whereas the stopping of the clocks would do no harm, a little temporary harm might be done ti) commerce by the political pegging of the exchanges. . . .

The ultimate blame is, however; placed by Mr, Glasgow not upon the politicians themselves but upon those who expect them to do impossibilities. The politicians nowadays, lie says, are placed iri so equivocal a position by the comprehensiveness of what they are expected'to do, that many serious people have' begun to question the practical value Of what, they attempt. If the politicians fail to dp what they set out to do, then no harm .seems to be dons; if thsy do it, then one is patient and hopes for the best, . - y Having been unable to do what they set out to do at the Economic Conference, the politicians have done no harm.1 The Conference was therefore not the "failure"-that it is commonly represented to have been!