WEALTH'S RESPONSIBILITIES.

Evening Star, Issue 19841, 14 April 1928, Page 6

WEALTH'S RESPONSIBILITIES.

Thk trade returns for the financial year ended last month show the position to have been retrieved as compared with the previous year by no loss than thirteen millions sterling. Whereas 192627 showed a 2£ millions excess of imports, 1927-28 shows a 10J millions excess of exports. Among several causes operating, the chief place must be attributed to the improved prices current in overseas markets. This is a factor which fluctuates, and too great optimism, accompanied by a fresh launching out on purchases from abroad, is a thing which the community would do well to avoid. It is significant that in the more solid and profound British periodicals pleas are being put forward for national economy, not only public, but private. During the war an immensely successful appeal was made for voluntary saving for a specific and vital purpose. An economy campaign among the people is far more difficult now than it was then. • The appeal then was reinforced by the inability or illegality to buy many goods and services. But now one of the features which have impressed themselves on competent observers is the apparently almost complete disappearance of the habit of saving out of income among the generality of the well-to-do classes. It is possibly a reaction from the war, which has lasted longer than ought to have been the ease, and is becoming so ingrained as to take on the Seeming of a fixed habit. Perhaps it has been encouraged by the heavy taxation imposed by Government, which seems to create a feeling that any surplus in the pocket should be dispersed on personal expenditure, lest the Government find some fresh device for transferring it to the Treasury. As a trivial instance of what dangers menace our civilisation one writer mentions that the price asked—and paid—for half a dozen caviare sandwiches and half a bottle of champagne at a certain London night club is £7 10s. But it is not by more abstinence from luxury expenditure that the big accretions needed can be won for the capital fund ol the nation. The prosperity of the nation and of the Empire bangs on the economic use of its material resources. The poorer that use the nearer comes the day when the demand for a radical change m the basis of government and the conduct of industry will overpower resistance. If private ownership is to continue o be the basis of our economic life, the individual owner of wealth or oi a business must realise that for public recognition of his right to remain m possession he has a national duty to manage his private property and his business in a rational way, with .an ovo to the welfare of the whole community. In Maerdy, a Welsh mining village in the Rhondda Valley, almost all its 7,000 inhabitants are Communists. It has been nicknamed “Little Moscow,” for in its Working Men’s Hall there hang large framed portraits of Stalin and other Soviet leaders. The men have been unemployed for years. If they are caught working any coal for themselves to eliminate one of the household expenses for winch the “dole” is all too meagre, they are fined or imprisoned. The coal owners have mismanaged both men and material in the past, and show no signs of doing better now. Because of their disasfcuous clashes twelve years ago a lucrative market was closed through the Admiralty’s decision to substitute oil luel iu the Navy for W clsli steam coal. The people are described as clean and self-respecting. Their life is so empty, dreary, and purposeless that the wonder is they stay in their bleak valley. But they have nowhere to go. They cannot see beyond the smoky corner of the world into which they have been born. Under tho circumstances tho obvious remedy is the resettlement of the workers in some other place and some other occupation. But their own programme is different. By one of them a visitor was told: “ One oi these days—quicker and more suddenly than you think the mines will he nationalised and the workers will own their own means of production. There will be work for everybody in tho Workers’ Government. Russia and China will trade with us.” Tho visitor’s conclusion was that never were a people more in need of help, physical, moral, spiritual. It is not surprising that appeals for private economy and for a more practical realisation of tho responsibilities of wealth should be made; hut it is surprising that tho response of so many should be found in habitual patronage of expensive night clubs. In England there are still to be found—perhaps less on tho surface than of yore, because of the “dole”—the extremes of wealth and poverty. As the Overseas Dominions emerge from the adolescent stage, symptoms of the same disease — for it is a disease—appear intermittently. The prevalence of unemployment is apt to breed the same ideas as those reported from tho “Little Moscow” iu South Wales. Failing other evidence, wo are inclined to regard the window-smashing episode at Parliament Buildings in Wellington this week-end as a demonstration of a feeling that certain responsibilities are by no means shouldered as they might be.