THE TALE OF A SHELL

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 April 1932, Page 8

THE TALE OF A SHELL

HOW WAR DEBTS AROSE.

LONDON, February 20.

At the annual meeting of the Chamber of Shipping of the United Kingdom, held at Leathersellers’ Hall, Hon. Alexander Shaw, deputy chairman of the P. and 0. Steam Navigation Company, moved a resolution supporting the action of the Government in offering all-round cancellation of war debts and and asking that the policy of the British Empire should be directed towards reducing rather than increasing •world barriers to trade. Illustrating the inconsistency of the war debts’ position, he quoted a wartime experience: “On the Western Front,” he said, “I happened to be the gun officer of a 15in. howitzer that fired a shell, weighing 1,6001 b., which destroyed a French chateau —as it was intended to do. Now, probably, the shell was paid for from the proceeds of an American loan. As a consequence its explosion created a gold debt due to the United States of America as well as a Reparations debt due from Germany foi' destruction of French property. “If the shell had been fired by an American battery at the same chateau and with the same purpose America would never have sent us a bill either for the cost of the shell, the use of the gun’s crew, or the wear and tear of the howitzer itself. Sensible Americans would never have dreamt of such thing. “But have they not, indeed, done something still more strange about that shell? They were saved the whole expense of providing the howitzer and of paying and feeding the officers and men who worked the gun. But in spite of having been saved all that trouble and expense they charged Great Britain because she put herself to the cost and trouble of doing all these things.” The problem "was to banish a curse which was dislocating, and, so long as it remained would continue to dislocate, the economic machinery of the whole world. No petty schemes and fiscal, expedients would avail. Cancellation of reparations and war debts is the only practical policy—a policy, as Mr. Gladstone would have said, of ‘Bag and baggage.’ ”