NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19413, 23 August 1926, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE WORKING DAY. "The passion with which trade unionists regard and dei'end the shorter working day of modern times is entirely unintelligible to our rulers. Yet it belongs fundamentally to the trade unionist outlook,", says the Manchester Guardian* in a powerful criticism of the proposal to restore the eight-hour day for miners.' "Not only is the shorter working day the one conspicuous gain that the workers of Europe have managed, to hold out of the gains that came to them with the war, but there is more passion in this struggle ■than the mere desire, however ardent, to keep this material gain. More than low wages the long working.day and the lack of holidays have signalised in the common consciousness of the workers those inequalities of life of which they feel themselves the victims. The great mass of work in the industrial world is done by men and women who have no sensational rewards to expect, whose uninteresting or uncomfortable toil is unilluminated by any sense of spiritual adventure or the expectation of some brilliant service, to mankind. For them the sense of independence, the feeling that they are, as we say, their own masters, regts on the extent to which they can enter into the ordinary life and the ordinary habits of the society of which they are citizens. From this point of view the shorter working day is the chief symbol of the pro-, gress that the trade union movement has achieved." • THE PRINCIPLES OF ECONOMY. " The human mind In .our present state of development* can no more solve with certainty the problems of world finance than it can devise a system for breaking the bank at Monte Carlo," said Mr. Winston Churchill, in an address at a Mansion House banquet: There • were, however, some very broad simple truths which gave a sort of rough-and-ready rule-of-thumb 'guide through all the mysteries and tangles. In fact, the mysteries and tangles seemed to begin only when those very broad simple guides were abandoned. The fundamental principles of all finance, public and.private, were these: "Cultivate peace and good will. Worit hard. Avoid ■profusion'. Save. Balance your budget and pay your way. Pay your debts. Pay them quickly. Let your word be your bond. Do a fair day's work for the money you earn, and make sure you are paid in an honest and stable currency." He,did not think there was anything else. The infallible test whether any principle or method of finance was sound or not, was that in finance everything that was sound was disagreeable. Whenever there was any method or expedient in finance which it was easy and pleasant to adopt, they might be quite sure it was unsound. When they adopted unsound methods of finance they got the pleasure at the time and paid the price afterwards. When they adopted sound methods- of finance they paid the price at the time and got the reward afterwards. Accordingly, a good Chancellor of the Exchequer always did disagreeable things, and was very likely to be criticised and scolded by ignorant and short-sighted people. A people had the right to ask its Government for sound finance and stable currency. They were inter-dependent. Sound finance and stable currency did not benefit the rich alone. On the contrary, -it was the poor man who suffered most when lavish expenditure led to Budget deficits and Budget deficits to borrowing and borrowing to what is called "the creation of money," without any corresponding increase in the creation of real goods. It was the rich man who could transfer his wealth most readily into other currencies. It was the poor man whose narrow margins were soonest § inched by an increased cost of living, ouhd finance and stable currency had been the financial policy of Great Britain, whatever' party had been in power, ever since they emerged from the tumult of war. They were determined to persevere in it, and were confident that- it would be loo; the benefit of all«