BRITISH FREE TRADE

Huntly Press and District Gazette, Volume XVIII, 17 November 1931, Page 3

BRITISH FREE TRADE

AN OUTSIDER LOOKS AT IT. In the Atlantic Monthly Mr Ralph E. Flanders deals with Great Britain and its free trade policy. “For nearly three generations,” he says, “England’s policy of free trade has been vigorously maintained. Under it she has, until recently, reaped all the rewards which traditional economics has ascribed to the practice. Her natural resources have been an abundant supply of coal and iron. Her climate has been conducive to action and thought. Her people have been intelligent, enterprising, adaptable, reliable, and energetic. Nature, in ."hort, has loaded the dice heavily in her favour. “With these advantages, and with the added resource of vast colonial dependencies, she boldly abandoned a self-supporting agriculture, imported, her food across the seas from the cheapest sources, drew her rural population into the manufacturing centres, attracted the raw materials of the whole earth to her docks and quays, and equipped her workshops to transform them into every imaginable object of beauty or use for distribution to the very outposts of civilisation. “This policy brought her wealth and power—more than have fallen to the lot of any other nation in the whole course of history. Is it any wonder that her economists—as well as those of other nations who looked upon her as an object lesson—should elaborate her free-trade policy into a theory which was logically impregnable ? “But where stands England now, j after the menopause of the World War? Her natural resources, though still great, are visibly diminishing. Her markets are narrowing while competition grows sharper. Her people show signs of discouragement and for ten years without intermission millions of them have been without employment. “Her monetary resources are still enormous and her financial integrity remains unquesitoned; but this does not serve to correct her maladjustments, for the causes of her calamity j are numerous and varied. Among | them may be included the growth, among her foreign customers, of that sentiment of nationalism, that desire for self-sufficiency. But the chief cause lies in the very effectiveness and whole-heartedness with which England has served the world in the decades just passed. “Since the early years of the nineteenth century she has placed no embargo on her capital and her mach-

ines, and she never did on her skill. For long years past there have been available at the going price for the benefit of mankind. Steel works in America and cotton mills in India, China and Japan—and these were the very bone and marrow of her own economic framework—were financed by British capital equipped with British machinery, and their staffs trained by British executives. “Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, and Russia each in turn learned from her teaching, buying from her seemingly inexhaustible store the fundamentals of successful competition in the industrial age. And at last that tutelage has come to its appropriate fruition in the nature of self-suffici-ency of her beneficiaries. “Such is England’s present state. It is by no means hopeless, but the readjustments that are now required of her will be difficult and painful. In relinquishing her pre-eminent place of leadership in industry and commerce to become merely one one among several eager contenders for the world’s trade, her people will be required to change their occupations, to re-distribute themselves geographically, and possibly to decrease their actual numbers. “The mental changes—changes in position and outlook—will be still more distressing, but they are even now under way, and will eventually be effected. “There is here no refutation of the inexorable logic behind the doctrine of free trade. The apostles of free trade have always recognised the necessity of readjustments to changing conditions, the shift of industries and activities to regions where newly-dis-covered resources and newly-devel-oped abilities offer a preponderant competitive advantage. “Put who foresaw the immensity ; of the adjustment required? Who I could have believed that it would in- , volve the fate of an empire and the hapipness of its sovereign people? r The truth of the economic doctrine remains, but in how ironic and disheartening a sense.”