NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18455, 19 July 1923, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

IF GERMANY PAYS.

People talk about the wealth of Germany and of her splendid economic equipment. What does that mean in terms of pure economics and apart from the moral and political issues asks the Spectator. It means that, should Germany be called upon to make an enormous payment to France, she cannot pay in gold or credit, since she has neither. Therefore, she can pay only in goods. This, if allowed, she can do, thanks to her industrial equipment. She can set her people toiling, sweating in factory, miae, and forge, while the Frenchmen, who would otherwise be making either the goods in question or other goods to pay for them, take a rest, or, in other words, became temporarily unemployed. " But," it will perhaps be said, " payment in goods is a very crude expedient. The Germans, whatever the sacrifice, must be made to get gold in some form or other and shall pay it to France." Let us assume that this is done. Will France be any the better off? Just as surely as in the case -of the torrent of goods which we have prospectively described her workmen will be given a rest—that is, be thrown out of work—by the cash payment of the German debt. The sudden glut of gold must inevitably have an immediate effect on French prices. Instead of falling they will soar, and there will be such a disturbance of French value? that half the employers and industrialists and half the peasants in France will be temporarily ruined. For a short time there may be a certain amount of wild panic expenditure; but the consumer everywhere will be screaming in his agony at what he will call the unholy profiteering and the conspiracy to bleed him. . So things will go on till a veritable crash comes. ' •;■•■'■' MID-VICTORIAN LONDON. Is the . world. getting better or worse? The recently published "Letters and Memoirs of Sir William Hardman," covering the period from 1859 to 1871, should iielp to provide an answer to this difficult question. Reviewing this book the Times Literary Supplement states: The gala •of the Prince of Wales' marriage brings Out another quality • of the age. Hardman took a . lady to see the illuminations. On Ludgate Hill he saw a rush of the crowd coming, and hurried her aside. "One woman was killed where we were standing not five minutes before, and three more were trodden out (and killed, of course) higher up the hill." Police and people, as late events have shown, have learned a good deal since 1863, which was still in many ways a time of brutal manners. At the Crystal Palace in 1862, when,the actresses of the day were tending stalls at a charity fete, "an old boor from the" country with a lady on his arm made improper witticisms in Hardman's hearing to a Miss Tungate, on the assumption that actresses, with no boors to squire them, had no modesty that could possibly bo offended. Happily "Mary Anne," Hardman's stately (and, we suspect, highly redoubtable) wife, made a very pretty amende for the countryman's insolence. It is ' thise country visitors, fumes Hardman, that keep London coarse and dissipated; but his memoirs show little gentleness anywhere. There is an allusion to the "Northumberland Street tragedy (a subject discussed by Thackeray, too), in which a certain Major Murray, with two bullets in his head, turned on his wouldbe murderer with tongs and a wine bottle and battered his life out with amazing ferocity. Virtue could be as savage as vice in this epoch. Another of Hardman's letters discusses a functionary then still much in the public eye, the veteran Mr. William Caicraft. We are reminded of some other memoirs of this period; in which there is a gruesome sketch of the , old man tottering round under the drop while the crowd roared execrations at him, and hanging with his weight on the legs of the suspended criminalto make sure.

ARCHBISHOP AND RAILWAYMEN.

Newcastle Cathedral was recently filled with a congregation of over 2000 people —nearly all of them raihvaymen to hear a sermon by the Archbishop of York. The Bishop of • Newcastle and the Vicar of Newcastle, together with the Mayor and some members of the corporation, attended the service. The lessons were read by a signalman. The archbishop said that no man could fail to be moved when one remembered all the hopes and struggles and desires of the great movement represented, at the sight of that enormous gathering. It was a proof, if proof were needed, that the great mass of workers were desirous of a spiritual basis for their movement, and it confirmed the statement of Labour leaders issued in 1919 that the movement was not based merely on materia] foundations. Fears -were sometimes expressed that Labour was imbued with an antireligious spirit; such a service as that was an answer to their fears. With Mr. Arthur Henderson, he believed that no section of the Community had deep in its heart such an admiration for the teaching, character, principles, and' life of Christ. His Grace went on to say that the first pride and obligation of the industry would be to give every man a sufficient wage for him and his family to live a worthy life; and their further ideals were that men should have leisure, and should receive through their representatives an increasing share in determining the conditions of their work and have some intelligent .understanding of the business which they formed. There must be, under any economic scheme of things, capital and management on the one hand, and labour on the other. In the past, the claims of capital ' had been considered too exclusively; he begged them not to go to the opposite extreme and think only of labour. The nation would be benefited by inter-play, and inter-under-standing of-the two forcea,