IS THE AGE SOFT?

Greymouth Evening Star, 8 November 1933, Page 10

IS THE AGE SOFT?

POST WAR GENERATION. What is wrong with the world? Most erf its modern advisers diagnose excess of competition and lack of organisation, and prescribe more planning, national and international, more control by State and super-State authority. On all this school of thought Sir Ernest Benn has made a dashing onslaught in his new book, “This Sott Age” (writes H. C. Bailey, in the London “Daily Telegraph.”) Even the ranks of Tuscany will scare forbear to cheer. Sir Ernest has in former assays proved himself a doughty champion of individualism. Here lie is more combatant, more provocative and more stimulating than ever. His victims, whether Socialist doctrinaires or eminent politicians, or —Sir Ernest’s pet abomination—the official and the expert adviser, must needs allow that he is a “bonny lighter.”

His destructive power should set many people in all parties examining their principles again. What is of most importance is the effect of the book’s striking vindication of the virtues of individualism on the minds of the generation now coming to maturity of manhood. On that purpose its force is concentrated.

For a generation our intellectuals have been making us laugh at the foolish Victorian virtues of “self-help-ful. wholly strenuous Samuel Smiles.” Sir Ernest Benn will annoy much complacency with his sarcastic summary of the principles of our enlightened age.

We have abandoned the notion that effort must precede success. We do not ask what a man is worth, but what lie needs. Our ideal is the soft, pleasant life, with no trouble for every body. We regard the State as an instrument for the satisfaction of every desire. If we are in any trouble the politicians must put it right. In them we have perfect faith. So our habits of thought are set. before us. and it is not to be denied that the satire strikes at all parties in politics. Sir Ernest Benn finds little virtue in any. When governments try to plan and regulate trade they make a muddle. He even finds offence in the “Buy British" propaganda. “We started it (he protests) and. as the one people who, above all others, depend upon export trade, have little reason to be proud of the way in which every other nation has followed our example.”

THE SWOLLEN STATE. This is hardly fair to our long-suf-fering country. We did our best to persuade the world of the virtues of Free Trade; we made sacrifices to preserve the sacred principle of free imports which shook our financial system. If we are now cultivating the domestic market and protecting it by tariffs, the cause is irresistible economic pressure.

A word might have been spared to acknowledge that in other countries the encouragement of home industries has not been found incompatible with large export trade. It is. however, against the swollen power of the Stale that Sir Ernest directs the main weight of bis attack. The State, ho argues, cannot be honest cither morally or intellectually.

It will always, treat its people unfairly: it will always act.from confusion of thought. This is inevitable, because the directing power of the State is in the hands of a foolish electorate. The best “sample of a Government” which democracy has evei’ produced, Sir Ernest concedes, is our present National Government, but he proceeds to find it guilty of continuing the “Socialist procedures” in planning* and rationalisation and official control from which we desired to be saved. This increase of official power produced by the superstition that virtue lies in State management is crushing out enterprise and individual initiative in trade, while it has brought into being a large class of bureaucrats who produce nothing but are parasitic on industry. The recent course ,of politics, as Sir Ernest Benn sees it, is a process of “squeezing out the middle class.” In their financial measures Governments have deliberately weakened the mid-dle-class position, diminishing the interest on gilt-edged securities, loading the moderate incomes with taxation, turning profits into losses by/municipal and Government, trading, and thwarting new enterprise by regulation.

The middle class, in Sir Ernest Benn’s economics, are the trustees of the nation’s capital, “almost the only people who know the difference between capital and income,” a distinction obscure to Chancellors of the Exchequer, and the national policy is to ruin them.

When we come to the treatment of the unemployment problem, we find a bluff denial that the machine is the enemy of the man. Machinery, it is argued in the manner of the old economists, does not diminish, but actually increases the demand for labour. Where men are thrown out of work by the machine it is because they expect the politicians to keep them employed at their own job or else maintain them in idleness. This is surely a rather abstract way of discussing a subject of complex difficulties. The contention that unemployment is being created and prolonged by the burdens on industry is made much more effectively. While “trade and agriculture go from bad to worse,” the Government departments which control them have come to cost ,in 1930 fifty times as much as in .1900. The deduction is that a main cause of unemployment is in the taxation which I tal;es capital and income that, should have been the basis of industrial ex-1 pansion. i

What is the root of ail the evil? W’hy have we lost faith in the old individualism? The cause is that for the last fifteen years the nation has lacked the full measure of strength, vigour, experience and judgment which lies in the 30/50 men.” The war, in fact, weakened our manhood. We have had to rely on a population which was not of the old stuff. In the coming years the proportion of men of this age of highest capacity, between thirty and fifty, must naturally increase.

Sir Ernest warns us not to expect a miraculous transformation. He will not consent to end his challenging and disturbing book on a note of clear optimism. But he allows us a reasonable hope.