NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19809, 2 December 1927, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE WORLD LANGUAGE. "There is no end to the extension of the forms or moulds into which we may run this language of ours —the greatest medium of expression in the world today," said Mr. John Galsworthy, in a lecture at Manchester, on the English language. "Including its American variety, the English language is the word coin og 170 millions of white people spread over nearly half of the land surface of the earth. It is the language of practically every sea, the official tongue of some 350 millions, brown, black and yellow people, th© accredited business medium of the would, and more and more taught in South America and Japan. It would appear mcjeed to have a certain start of the artificial languages, Esperanto. Volapuk, Ido, in the race for the honour of being the second language used in every country. In fact, any impartial scrutiny made at tJhis moment of time must place English at the head of all languages as the most likely to become, in a natural, unforced way, the single inter-commum-eating tongue. The Napoleonic wars left French the predominant medium of mental exchange. French is still, perhaps, the leading speech in Europe, but French will never now spread effectually by natural means beyond Europe and North Africa. The decline of Europe, the ex pansion of the British Empire, the mag netic and ever-increasing power of America, are making English the real world-language."

WAGES IN THE UNITED STATEB. The widespread impression that American employers worked out a philosophy of high wages and embarked upon a settled policy of increasing wage rates with the conscious object of augmenting the purchasing power 6f the working population is controverted in a report to the Overseas Trade Department by Sir J. J. Broderick, commercial councillor at the Washington Embassy. He states that the regulation of wage rates has responded rather to the .ordinary working of the law of supply and demand and to ordinary, and sometimes violent, methods of adjustment. No year has elapsed since the war without its record of stukes and labour disturbances, occasioned either by the attempts of the work ing forces to secure advances in wages or by those of employers to reduce them. Such disputes were both numerous and serious while the country, in 1920-22, was still suffering from the shock of the postwar price deflation, and they still continue to be one of the normal phenomena of American industrial life, but, owing to sustained general activity in the last five years, the wage question has given rise to much fewer and less important struggles than in earlier times But a further important point is made —namely, that the working population, on its side, has taken note of the fact that large output and high earnings, since 1922 at all events, have synchronised so closely as to be probably interdependent, while employers, as a rule, have recognised more clearly than ever before the fact that, when by far the greater part of the goods they produce are sold on the home market, the wages of the labour that goes to their manufacture constitute also the most important proportion of the fund out of which the goods are purchased

SOCIAL DISCONTENT. "With all the accumulated wealth which we possess in our highly-cultivated land and all that is thereon and therein, why should the people not be in a state of reasonable contentment?" asks a writer in the Scotsman, "In looking for the reasons for the antagonism to our industrial arrangements we would be on a wrong track if we sought for them in abstract principles or in the writings of expert economists. The mass of the people in all classes never think of abstract principles and never read books on economics. The workers have put forward severai reasons for their dissatisfaction with the industrial system. While they have obtained political power and can elect representatives of their own class as members ol the House of Commons and thus have a voice m the gov eminent ol the country, they have no direct voice in the management of the business in which they are employed. It almost looks as il we have evolvod industrial and commercia,! arrangements which are too vast and&too complicated for the mass oi the people to thoroughly understand, and that somo of our most difficult problems and the attack ori the existing system are due to mistrust and suspicion arising out ol the complex working oi the industrial machine and the difficulty of satisfying the workers' desire for a share of control. There also appears to bo a spirit of domination in both employers and employees which cannot fail to embitter the relations be tween them • Man is subject to many passions and influences and it seems inevitable that our system of politics and our system of economics cannot be carried on without friction, unrest and discontent. They are the concomitants of progress for which there is no pana cea, but our troubles may bo much reduced by dealing with them in • true spirit of equity."