SQUANDERING WEALTH.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19604, 5 April 1927, Page 10

SQUANDERING WEALTH.

BISHOP'S PLAIN WARNING. THE FOLLY OF EXCESS. You cannot take a quart out of a pint pot, and you cannot raise wages all round unless you first increase the wealth of the country. This is the theme of Dr. A. C. Headlam, Bishop of Gloucester, in a pamphlet entitled "Economics and Christianity." Dr. Headlam characterises as "disastrous" the intervention of some of the bishops and other religious leaders in the coal strike. He declares that there is no such thing as "Christian economics," and that the greatest enemies of the working classes arti "these philanthropic persons who persist in ignoring economic facts, and their own leaders who plunged them into a disastrous conflict (the coal strike), and whose motive appears to have been much more their own political importance than the well being of those whom they claim to support." The bishop argues that the workers can be injured by excessive wages, and that "there is a (law in all those schemes which certain social reformers have put forward for reducing the inequalities between rich and poor by taxing or confiscating the property of the rich. . . . " Industry in creating wealth and wisdom in using it are the two things necessary for creating economic well-being, and that industry must .be the industry not merely of the workmen but of all those who work with their brains and by their united action contribute to the country's well-being."