NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21727, 16 February 1934, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

SIGNS OF RECOVERY

"The expansion of the heavy iron and steel trade in Great Britain has gene hand-in-glove with the steady improvement of the finer steel trade and tool trade of Sheffield," states Sir Arthur Balfour in the Observer. "During the last three months not only have the workers who had been employed on part time gone into full time, but, oi greater importance, 15,000 workers had found employment, and the situation is improving steadily. When it is remembered that the improvement in trade in Sheffield and in the steel trade of the country generally has taken place in snite of the fact that shipbuilding, heavy engineering and armament work practically do not exist, it is quite clear that even a slight revival in shipbuilding and heavy engineering would give a tremendous impetus to trade throughout the country. Only a few months ago the price of scrap steel «as so low that it did not pay to cut up obsolete ships. Now the price of sfrap has risen so rapidly that obsolete, ships are being cut up, and the probabilities are that during the next three or four years we shall rebuild our mercantile marine with modern ships of greater carrying capacity and furnished with new types of motive power, which will be so economical that the older ships will have to be scrapped. This gives promise of good trade for some time to come." "WHITHER BRITAIN?" There were some very common misconceptions about the possibility of world unity, said Mr. H. G. Wells, in a broadcast talk in the 8.8.C. series "Whither Britain?" To make political unions was to face the maximum resistance of old historical traditions, racial suspicions, vested interests, deeprooted prejudices and habits of thought. But need they try that way? Human unity could quite possibly be got at along other lines at once more real and binding, and far less disturbing to accepted ideas. It was because he believed that there was this other way that he was not much of an advocate of the League of Nations. Jhe fundamental weakness of the League of Nations lay in the fact that it was primarily and essentially a political organisation. The league of President Wilson at Geneva provided no means worth talking about for dealing with the increasingly common economic life of mankind. It provided no means whatever of dealing with money trouble. There were reasons why this state of affairs in the monetary system should have come about, but there was no invincible reason on earth why it should continue. There was every reason why it should end. We had to adjust money throughout the world to the needs of world production/ In the end this trouble of business confusion, which centred now upon money, was more serious even than political stresses and the danger of war. It has a warfare of its own. FUSING DOLLAR AND POUND

All the great economic communities of the world were fighting desperately now, with tricks of inflation and so forth, with tariffs and shipping laws and restrictions upon trading and a multitude of such devices, to shift'the steadily increasing burthen of distress one to the other, continued Mr. Wells. Men did not. intend to take disorganisation and ruin without a struggle. And that fight was not being waged by "that little sham world parliament at Geneva"; it was being waged most, plainly and conspicuously in two great economic communities that had no voice at Geneva —the United States and Soviet Russia. Bold and great as President Roosevelt's schemes were, said Mr. Wells, he did not believe he could carry them out if he had to carry them out in the United States alone. And the first clause of his answer, therefore, to the question "Whither would I have Britain go?" was—toward at least an understanding, and participation and identification with the American experiment, and, if possible—though that he admitted was more difficult—an understanding with the Russian struggle. Consider what it would mean for the whole world if the dollar and the pound could be fused into one money. Suppose it were possible to create a Trade and Money Board for these two vast systems. It need not be very different in its nature from that National Recovery Board set up by President Rooseveit, only it would be broader. Otico the American and the British systems got together into that much co-operation, it would not be many years before that Trade and Money Board he was imagining became a Trade and Money Board for all the world.

SCIENCE AND SOCIETY Ihe state of science is in remarkable contrast with that of other human affairs. Development has never been more rapid. During the last two years entirely new regions of research have been discovered in physics, chemistry, and biology," writes the scientific correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. "The present social disorder is intimately connected with this riot of discovery, as the application of science to agriculture has, in the absence of adequate social direction, helped to precipitate it. Within the last ten or fifteen years the advances in agricultural science have been such that the world's capacity for food and organic raw material production has been doubled. Sir Daniel Ilall writes that the recent progress in power machinery lias increased the efficiency of largescale farming to a degree not yet appreciated. The proper employment of power machinery requires a wealth of directive skill and a technique of national organisation which only began to bo attempted during the war. Sir Daniel regards the Soviet planning as a generalisation of this tendency, and considers the possibility of its success is so good that only drastic improvements will enable agriculture in other countries presently to compete with it. While an American professor of agriculture complains that five million pigs weighing less than one hundred pounds and two hundred thousand prospective mother sows are to bo slaughtered to restore national prosperity, Danish scientists are introducing central heating into pigstyes because pigs require 20 per cent less food if kept warm artificially, and the cost, of the extra food is more than that of the central heating. After this ingenious achievement the Danes are having to turn many of their pigs into soap, because new British laws have limited their market for bacon. The British Minister of Agriculture has offered incentives to pig-breeders, and within a few months is already complaining of a plethora of pigs."