BRITAIN’S NEEDS

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 21963, 6 March 1946, Page 2

BRITAIN’S NEEDS

RESULTS OF THE WAR LOAN FROM U.S.A, "We salute the majestic and signal contribution which the might of fli’e U.S.A. made to the winning of the war,” said the High Commissioner for the United Kingdom in New Zealand, Sir Patrick Duff, at a civic reception held in his honour in Palmerston North, “but it is perhaps natural for us in Britain to reflect that Britain’s present needs are the direct consequence of the fact that we fought earliest, than we fought longest, and that we fought hardest; and that it was to our efforts in the common cause and the privations which we suffer now — and suffer alone—are due. “From this point of view, and looking at it also, we think, dispassionately from the point of view' of the restoration of world prosperity, we cannot "be unduly enthusiastic over the terms ol the financial arrangements between the United Kingdom and the U.S.A., which are now under debate in America.” Sir Patrick warned people not to be discouraged if they sometimes heard gloomy forecasts by economists. “Economists do not know everything,” he said. How Britain rearmed after Dunkirk amid bombing and black-out and dispersal was something beyond the calculation or the vision of economists. Statistics hide their diminished heads before the spectacle of Great Britain furnishing seven-tenths of all the armaments used by the entire forces of the British Commonwealth and Empire.

“The British people, possess at home some raw material for manufacturing salvation and some raw material for producing progress for themselves and for others which does not have to be bought or borrowed, but which lies deep and thick and solid and eternal jin the unfathomable mines of the Britj'ish character. And the stuff is called courage.”