NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19391, 28 July 1926, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE MENACE OF HOARDINGS A recent decision of the High Court in England has established the powers of local authorities to deal with unsightly hoardings. Commenting on (ihe judgment, the Times observed that in the matter of the disfigurement of natural beauty the offender is very rarely a native of the region. It is the adventurous stranger, who, having no care for the. place except for what money he may make out of it, destroys what is not his own. The fault of the native is too often his apathy under provocation, his want of proper jealousy for the beauty and purity of his neighbourhood. Against every case of violation some few protest, but the majority raise no voice; and far too ofteu, it is some visitor to the place who calls public attention to its disfigurement. . . , Ten miles or more from every town the country roads begin to be disfigured by the advertisements of traders in that town. The ideal would be achieved if everyone resolved never to have dealings with any trader who so advertised his goods. The hoardings would then disappear without need of by-law. Until public opinion acquires that force, enactment must take its place.

SELLING BRITISH GOODS. " The exhortation to ' buy British goods' seems to me to connote a wrong mentality toward the whole question of British trade revival—a sort of implication that it is the consumer's responsibility to revive British trade and that the producer and the merchant and retailer have no responsibility," says Sir Basil Clarke, in a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts. " I would argue that, on the contrary, the main responsibility is theirs, not the consumer's; that the chief trade need of the nation at, this time would be better expressed if the slogan ' Buy British Goods ' were altered to ' Sell British Goods.' In other words, I would sooner see the producers and the merchants and salesmen of this country galvanised into increased activity and keenness to make British products so good in price and quality and so keenly in demand (from the excellence of British salesmanship), that they made their way on their merits, and, not through sentiment, into the markets of the world at home and abroad. Let our producers and merchants only achieve their part of this national duty and the consumer will not fail in his. He will buy British goods if the producer and merchant give him half a chance."

PARTNERSHIP IN INDUSTRY. " There is only one way that I can see which will really produce good will between employer and employed, and that is complete partnership in industry," said Vicount Grey in a speech recently. "That does not mean mere profit-sharing. Sharing in the management is what real partnership means. But one recognises that there are difficulties. The employer will say that his management will be impaired, by being made more cumbrous, by admitting representatives of the men and consulting them about the management of the works. There is a complete answer to that. It is that practical, efficient management is no use if it issterilised by the obstruction of labour; and the advantage that you could get if you could obtain the good will of labour by associating them with the management would far and away overbalance and outweigh any difficulty which might arise from making the management rather more slow." Other difficulties would be removed only when the point of view was changed. " Your real difficulty about partnership is that, until you have a real working partnership between employer and organised labour, you will not have good will; and until you have good will partnership will not work. That is a very serious dilemma. It is essential, before you can make'progress, that the points of view, both of employers and of organised labour, must be shifted. It is an, exceedingly difficult thing to shift the point of view of large masses of men. You cannot do it by speeches, but it can be done when there is some great catastrophe or some great upheaval; and the point in my mind is whether the upheavel of the general strike has been a sufficient lever to turn men's minds in the direction of a real alteration in the relations between capital and labour.