NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20911, 29 June 1931, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE DETECTION OF BLACKMAIL. Addressing a jury at Leeds Assizes, in a case in which a man was charged with demanding money with menaces, Mr. Justice Swift said that among the most - serious and terrible crime's known to the law, blackmail took a very important place. Ho did not say it the worst crime, but it certainly was among the worst. "The victim of blackmail is necessarily one who has done wrong, and the blackmailer is one who has got to know that fact and trades upon it," he continued. "The wise man goes at once to the police, but the foolish man, the weak man, afraid of the evil that he has done becoming known, pays, and he thinks, poor wretch, ho has finished with it all. He is quite wrong. There has never been a blackmailer yet who has got a first payment but has come back for more and more, and still more, until he has made the life of his victim a misery, ruining his health, his peace and his purse, until the moment comes when the wretched man goes at last to the police. The wise man goes to the police in thp first case. . . If you see traces of a rat running about your Fitting room you sot a trap. 1 here is no other way of catching it, and if the police officers have information that leads them to suppose that blackmail is going on, it is their duty to set traps so that the blackmailer may be caught and punished. Blackmail is a most serious and terrible crime, and if a jury is convinced that it has been committed tlicy must not shrink from their verdict by thought of the prosecutor's own wrong-doing. It is their duty to stamp blackmailing out." AN UNTENABLE POSITION. "The basic fact is that England is insisting upon maintaining a standard of living for her people which, however desirable, her economic situation does not justify, and which, sooner or later, the remorseless pressure of economic laws will compel her to abandon," said Lord Herbert Scott, the retiring president, in his address at the annual meeting of the London Chamber of Commerce. "The inflexibility of trade union regulations and wages prevents British goods from competing in price in the markets of the world. On the other hand, political exigencies forbid all approaches toward securing assured markets which alone might enable present standards of living to he maintained. The British people are, in fact, insistent upon enjoying the advantages of both worlds. The standard of living of our people must not be judged, as it so frequently is, solely on the basis of wage rates; these figures must be very heavily loaded by the cost of the free services which are rendered to the individual by the State, and which ultimately finds its way back through national and local taxation as a charge on industry, agriculture and commerce. Wages in kind must be added to wages in cash. We have now arrived at the point where, revenue being unequal to expenditure, resort is being had to borrow ing for current needs. I am told that no popularly-elected Government will reduce expenditure and that, so long as the party politician can borrow money, he will spend it, in order to secure votes. I want to emphasise that point—so long as he can find someone willing to lend, ho will go on borrowing and putting the country deeper into the mire. Unless the brake IS applied, and applied quickly, it is merely a question of time before we find ourselves in the same plight as Australia, and for the same reasons." THE SLAVE STATE. A series of articles describing conditions in the Russian timber camps, as rcveajed by official decrees of the Soviet Government and in the Russian press, was published recently by the London Times. "It is a fair assumption that the same ruthless organisation is characteristic of the whole campaign to carry out the Five Years Plan," it remarked, in a closing commentary. "Only a people of whom the masses arc too ignorant and too disorganised to offer any resistance, and who have through long generations become callous to suffering and oppression, would endure such dragooning. If it can go on enduring, tho small but enthusiastic and well-disciplined minority which controls every lever of power in Russia will succeed in its ambition to create a huge industrialised slave state, monopolising the whole production, trade and industry of nearly 150,000,000 of people. The creation of such a hugo monopoly under'a single centralised direction will confront the rest of the world —organised as it is- on tho basis of free labour, free exchange, and freo competition—with problems for which no solution is yet visible, but for which a solution will have to bo found if a great catastrophe is to be avoided. If tho directors of this monopoly were inspired by tho most benevolent intentions toward the rest of the world it would still be impossible to watch the growth of their power without the greatest anxiety; but they are animated by an implacable hatred and a fierce desire to reproduce in othor countries the horrors and the oppression they have inflicted upon their own. Anxiety can only be deepened by the weak complacency with which foreign Governments, bankers, industrialists and ; traders allow the Soviet organisation to ■ use them for its own purposes and to ; play them off one against the other. In that respect our own Government have l played, perhaps, the most pitiable role of i all."