The Manawatu Daily Times Mart of the World

Manawatu Times, Volume 60, Issue 66, 20 March 1935, Page 6

The Manawatu Daily Times Mart of the World

Three years ago the world, half-apprehensive, yet closely calculating where the ill wind would blow good, waited for the displacement of England as a foremost industrial Power and the chief market and stronghold of linance, writes Mr. Alan Bell in the Times Trade and Engineering Supplement. To-day rival captials have put aside their brief expectations and arc looking to this country and to London with deepened respect. Great Britain makes a text for foreign statesmen in their discourses on recovery, and London, her dominating strength glimpsed afresh in crisis, is revered more than before as invincible.

At the close of 1931, a time o! hazard anti anxiety at home, Mr. Max Winkler, the United States banker, cautioned the Export Managers’ Club in New York (a city then meditatively trying on London’s mantle) that the British capital, ‘‘so often ‘doomed,’ will again be sought by the nations rather than New York lor guidance and advice.”

At the beginning of 1935 it may be agreed that the world is looking to London not only for. light and leading, but as the supreme mart for the world’s goods. It needs more than an “economic blizzard” to impair the trading tradition of London —that would surmount an economic earthquake.

London Bridge marks the pierhead where Roman merchants unloaded vessels and the burgesses conducted business between the incursions of Saxon and Dane. There was a City Corporation before there was an English Parliament; and while other capitals rose to eminence as the scat of kings London grew to fame as the court of commerce.

In a thousand years of traffics and transactions its citizens have evolved standards, etiquette, even a language of their own, and for centuries they have taught mankind how international business may be ordered. There is continuity not merely in trade, but in the very names of its sponsors and conductors. To-day 40 London linns trace their origin to the 17th century, and nearly 1000 can boast of 100 years.