WILL THERE BE WAR

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume III, Issue 187, 24 July 1913, Page 3

WILL THERE BE WAR

to THE F.IHTOK. Sir.--There is a remarkable likeness betwet ii tin- tariffmonger and the scaremonger. Some ten years ago the vague and impossible scheme of tariff reform, as advocated by Mr, Chamberlain, found the support of most of the colonial papers and the unthinking man in the street, but when you got them down to bedrock they were not prepared to take the tax off British made goods, the most we would do was to slightly increase the taxes on foreign made goods. The whole Tory swindle as advocated by Mr. Chamberlain was badly beaten three successive times at the hands of the British electors, and even the Tory members are now tumbling over each other to get away from the proposed food taxes of the tariff reformers. It is the same sort of a wave of jingoism that caused the jelly-backed Ward party to adopt boy-conscrip-tion. The same low animal instincts are behind the two and the same false conception of trade and industry apply in the same way to both. As tariff reform is dead and buried long ago we need not trouble about it at present, but just a word about the scaremonger’s false conception of things. Norman Angell has clearly shown that the trade and financial arrangements of the great nations is so plaited and intertwined together that for one to make an assault <>n the other would be like cutting off one’s nose to spite one s face. -V fiery patriot sent to a London paper the following letter "When the German army is looting the cellars of the Bank of England and carrying off the foundations of our whole national fortune perhaps the twaddlers who are now screaming about the wastefulness of building four more Dreadnoughts will understand why sane men are regarding the opposition as treasonable nonsense. ' Let us asked what would be the result of such an action on the part of a German army. The first effect, of course, would be that, as the Bank of England ’s banker of all other banks, there would be a run on every bank in England, and a’.l would suspend payment. But simultaneously German bankers, many with credit in Lon don, would feel the effect. Merchants the world over, threatened with ruin by the effect oj the collapse in London, would immediately call in all their credits in Germany, and German finance would present a condition of chaos hardly less terrible than that in England. The German general while trying to sack the Bank of England, would find that his own balance (did he possess one) in the Bank of Berlin would have vanished into thin air, and the value of even his best investments dwindl ed as though by a miracle ; and that for the sake of loot, amounting to a few pounds apiece among his soldiers. For every £1 taken Ger man trade would suffer at least £lOOO. because the bullion reserve in the Bank 1 of England is relatively small. The entire influ ence of the whole finance and indus try of Germany would be brought to bear on the Government to end the cause of the trouble. It is true the German jingoes might wonder what they made war for, and the element ary lesson in international finance would do more to cool t heir blood than the greatness of the British Navy. The extraordinary inter dependence of the financial world is proved over and over again by re cent events which we see from day to day in the cables, and the silly scaremonger thinks that an invader can go and take away a country’s wealth like the Maori tribes took boats and carvings for booty. At some future time I will show how the fear of another Power taking these colonies is also an optica] illusion of those who talk of shoot ing straight, but if they would think straight the former would not be necessarv. —I am. etc., E. STEVENSON. Hastings. July 24, 1913.