CHEER FROM MACAULAY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20761, 2 January 1931, Page 6

CHEER FROM MACAULAY.

HUNDKED-YEAR-OIIX ESSAY DEPRESSION OF 1930. f ' / PROPHECY FOR PRESENT' YEAR. >■ [FROM ova OWN COE.HE!iPONDEKT.] ■ NEW YORK, Nov. 26. An analysis of the business depression of 1830, with its prophecy for 1930, by Lord Macaulay, was published recently in the forra of a full-page advertisement by the Harriman National Bank, as con- ' taining sound advice applicable to the present depression. This remarkable form of advertisement is reproduced in a similar manner by a national advertising agency, "hoping it may contribute to far-sighted thinking." The essay, published in the Edinburgh Review in January, 1830, lias an extraordinarily accurate application, although 100 years old, to the existing world slump. In part it is as follows: "History is full of the signs of this natural progress of society. We see in almost- every part .of tho annals of mankind how the industry of individuals, struggling up against wars, taxes, famines, conflagrations, mischievous prohibitions and more mischievous protections, creates faster than Governments can squander and repairs whatever invaders can destroy. We see tho capital of nations increasing and all the arts of life approaching nearer and nearer to perfection, -in spite of the grossest corruption aid the wildest profusion on the part of rulers. "The present moment is one o!: great distress. But how small will th it distress appear when we think ov;r the history of the last 40 years; a war, compared with which all other wars siuk into insignificance; taxation such as th<> most heavily-taxed people of former timeri could not have conceived; a debt larger than all the public debts that ever existed in the world added together; the food of the people studiously rendered de.ir; the currency impudently debased and improvidently restored. "Becoming Richer and Richer." "Yet is the country poorer i:ian in 1790 ? We fully believe that, in spite of all the mSsgovernment of her' rulers, she has;, been almost constantly becoming richer and richer. Now and then there has been a stoppage, now and l.hen a short retrogression; but as to tie general contingency there can be no doubt. A single breaker may recede; but 'the tide is evidently coming in. "If we were to prophesy that in the year 1930 a population •of fifty millions, better fed, clad and lodged than the English of our time, will cover these islands, that Sussex or Huntingdonshire will be wealthier than the wealthiest parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire now ar«, that cultivation, rich as that of 3. flower garden, will be carried up to the very tops of Ben Nevis and Helvellyn, that machines, constructed on principles yet undiscovered, will be in every home, that there will be no highways but railroads, no travelling but by steam, that our debt, vast as it seems to us, will appear to our great-grandchildren a trifling 'f.ncumbrance, which might easily be mid off in a year or two,, many people would think us insane. The Crash of 1720. "We prophesy nothing; but this ive say, if any person had told the Parliament which met in perplexity and terror after the crash of 1720 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all the wildest dreams, that the annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which they considered an intolerable burden—thjt for one man of £IO,OOO then living there would be five men of £50,00); that London would he twice as large and twica as populous and that nevertheless the mortality would have diminished to onehalf what it then was; that the posit office would bring more into the exchequer than the excise and customs had brought in together under Charles. II.; that stagecoaches would run from London to York 1 "' in 24 hours; that men would sail 'without * wind; and would be beginning to ride without horses; our ancestors would have given as much credit to the prediction as they gave to Gulliver's Travels. "Yet the prediction would hsvo been true; and they would have perceivsd that it was not altogether absurd, if they had considered that the country wj,si then raising every year a sum which would have purchased the fee-simple of the revenue of the Plantageriets—lo times what supported the Government of EJizabeth, three times what, in the time of Oliver Cromwell, had been thought intolerably oppressive. To almost' 3il men the state of things in which they have been used to live seems to be t,ho necessary state of things."