GERMAN EFFICIENCY

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 275, 20 October 1937, Page 8

GERMAN EFFICIENCY

RIGID INTERNAL ECONOMY. WELL DISCIPLINED NATION. “Everywhere* there was absolute cleanliness, evidence of strong aiscipline, and people were working very hard.” This was the observation made on what he had seen during a visit to Germany by Mr C. G. C. Dermer, of Cheltenham, to a “Standard” reporter yesterday, when giving his impressions on his trip abroad. Mr Dermer returned home yesterday after an absence of nearly seven months from New Zealand. , . . Despite the evidence of a rigid internal economy in Germany, added Mr Dermer, the people there seemed to bo quite happy, and he did not see anybody who was not working. It was very differenet in France, where people seemed to spend their lives in the cafes. There was a very ready and sincere hospitality, with a warm friendship, in Germany, for British people The Government was doing a wonderful national housing work, and transforming slums. Such _ was the rigorous attention to community cleanliness that the immediate penalty for dronping a tramway ticket was a fine of Is, without any option. Germany was cultivated absolutely to the last inch of soil, and he had seen wonderful crops of cereals. Not a limb of a tree was wasted, the economy measures being most efficient. These, with the firm discipline and measure of self-containment, created a . impression. Germans maintained that, surrounded as they were by eleven countries, with any one of which they might have to go to war, they had to make every man a soldier in the interests of national safety. PROSPEROUS COUNTRIES.

Evidence of general prosperity had been found by Mr Dermer in Holland, where he visited the Isle of Marken, a little community on the Zuyder Zee, which clung tenaciously to its Dutch traditions and customs, even guarding against their being broken down by inter-marriages with outsiders. The English tariff duty had hit the dairymen fairly hard, but crops were excellent, and the land was intensively cultivatea, the same obseivations being applicable to Denmark, where the Landrace pigs, evolved from the Large White breed, were remarkably uniform and standardised. Switzerland was a beautiful country, continued Mr Dermer, who stayed at Montreux, on the shores of Lake Geneva, climbed half-way up the Jungfrau, and made the ascent of Mount Pilatus on the funicular railway, which he described as a weird experience, with a sheer, straight drpp thousands of feet below. England’s industrial pulse was very strong, said Mr Dermer, and there was a real tone of prosperity. The United Kingdom was enjoying boom times, the effect of which was probably accentuated by the expenditure on rearmament. Nevertheless, after what he had seen on the Continent it was depressing to see the down-hearted spirit of farmers in the country districts of England, where crops were poor and pastures appeared to be deteriorating for want of efficient management and top-dressing, the growth being allowed to become rank in some places before stock was put on to it.