PRESSMAN ON WORLD CONDITIONS

Evening Star, Issue 21656, 27 February 1934, Page 8

PRESSMAN ON WORLD CONDITIONS

ROOSEVELT'S GREAT ADVENTURE TARIFFS PROTECT COMBINES—NOT THE PEOPLE [Per United Press Association.] WELLINGTON, February 27. Dr Walter Williams, honorary president of the World’s Press Congress, was an arrival by the Marama to-day from Sydney. In an interview he said he was on leave from tbe University of Missouri, where he was Dean of the faculty of Journalism. As the teacher of journalism, he said he considered that, in addition to a general, liberal, broad education and wide experience of life, specialisation was necessary, at least in America, if a student of journalism intended to go far. He thought there was an improvement in journalism in America. The depression had done some good in the sense that it had taken out the weaker newspapers, and necessarily only the better trained journalists had survived, with the result that the newspapers were better. One of the dangers be had seen in travelling round the world, and he had been almost everywhere except South Africa, was a Government-controlled Press. “ You get it, especially in Europe,” he said, with two or three exceptions.” It was only in the English-speaking countries that there was freedom of the Press, speech, and opinion. “ We spent a month or six weeks in Germany,” he said. “ I was there last year, and again this year, and as one journalist said: ‘ Silence is golden, and speech is a concentration camp.’ ” Dr Williams has free admiration for Mr Roosevelt, who is the most popular President the American people have had for a long time. “If he asked for the moon, I think they would give it to him.” Dr Williams attributed this to his human character and persuasiveness. Mr Roosevelt was ready to confess himself in error when something he tried out did not succeed. He had changed tactics several times in an effort to find the best thing to do. He had brought employment to some six or seven million people who were unemployed before. It was a great adventure he had embarked upon—a gamble Would not be the right word—and within a year it would have been proved a success or demonstrated a failure. Although he voted for the Eighteenth Amendment, Dr Williams says he is now satisfied that Prohibition was a mistake. He was one of the commission of ten set up by the regulations for the control of liquor after the Amendment was repealed, and he was brought into close contact with it. Conditions had been improved by the repeal of the Amendment. There was a better class of liquor, and the bootlegger was disappearing. The repeal of the Amendment would help to break up a lot of the gangster spirit. Dr Williams said he was not sufficiently conversant with tariff details to speak about them authoritatively, but all over the world there was developing an intense nationalism which put up barriers against trade rather than making trade and commerce freer and of more consequence. It was absurd to put up a tariff against New Zealand products and lose trade. There were three general subjects of commerce—the luxuries and the raw materials and, in between, the mass of manufactured products—that could be manufactured anywhere. It was an absurd proposition to put a tariff on raw materials, to destroy factories in countries where they could not get the raw materials. It was absurd to put a tariff on a luxury like fruit, because it could come only from countries that could grow fruit. The tariff system was unsatisfactory for the mass of the people. It supported the companies, corporations, and combines that were protected by it, but it did not benefit the bulk of the people.