The Manawatu Daily Times Profit and War

Manawatu Times, Volume 60, Issue 99, 30 April 1935, Page 6

The Manawatu Daily Times Profit and War

Fourteen points helped to stop a war. Twelve may help to prevent one —at least, so President lioosevelt appears to think, lieports on rearmament in Europe and consequent clouding ox the political atmosphere on that continent make a realisuc background against which the American Senate Munitions Committee's new plan to restrict war profits may be viewed.

A twelve-section outline of the programme, just laid before President lioosevelt, indicates that it is a pretty thoroughgoing one. Experience says it will not be easy to enact it into law' For financiers, industrialists, speculators yes, and wage earners—are too well accustomed to profiteering to readjust themselves readily to this plan. Or to any plan that woiuu make war the'same thing.in the counting house, the market, the shop, as it is on the battlefield; a stark and not-to-be-questioned sacrifice.

Nevertheless it is a plan that all workers lor peace should actively support. It would limit war incomes to £2OOO by confiscating all profits above that figure. It would draft industrial management as soldiers are drafted. It would commanded essential industries and services, impose taxes on everybody to cover war expenses on a pay-as-you-go basis. It might make war something to lie less lightly entered into than it has been.

But the background of European developments should warn enthusiasts that war will not be made impossible meiely by removing the big-profit motive. That this motive has played a part in bringing on war need not be questioned. But that it is the root cause of war needs to be questioned earnestly. And those who have been watching Europe trying to bring peace out of the last war can count many another influence at woik in the vortex of confiding national ambitions and emotions.

There are. many causes of war—causes deep seated -in human thinking, as well as those concocted by politicians who need to direct their public’s attention to national enemies in order to keep it off domestic instability. Any plan that succeeds in taking the profit out of -war will have removed one of these causes, and an important one, but only one. Let *ns press on this achievement. Let us not stop there.

Election Scares in Britain

Is Great Britain on the verge of a general election? The gossip-makers would have it so, and gossip-makers can sometimes create a scare among the credulous. But Mr. Neville Chamberlain, who is Chancellor of the Exchequer and principal organiser of the Conservative Party, has put his foot down on that proposition. “Don’t worry about elections,” he said the other day; “there won’t be any election yet awhile."

Why should there be? When Parliament abolished the Septennial Act, and substituted five for seven years as the maximum period between general elections, it did so because seven years was thought to be too long; but five years was held to be a reasonable time in which a strong Government should be allowed to develop its policy without interruption. Constant elections are unsettling. The present Government has been in office only three and a-half years. It has an overwhelming majority in the Commons. To appeal to the country now or in the autumn would reveal distrust of its own position and would involve the abandonment of much of its legislative programme.

This is not to say that the country or even its own supporters in Parliament are fully satisfied with what it is doing. Among the latter there has undoubtedly been mucli unrest and even some agitation. But what they demand is not the unsettlement of a general election, but a more vigorous policy which would strengthen the Government’s prestige. This apparently is why Mr. Lloyd George’s “New Deal” is receiving Cabinet’s careful consideration.