NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22346, 18 February 1936, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

BRITISH FARM POLICY British agricultural policy was discussed by Mr. Walter Elliot, the Minister of Agriculture, in an address to the Council of Agriculture for England. Mr. Elliot said that the great world surpluses were being more and more directed toward the British market and they must dovise some method of absorbing them which would go hand in hand with the possibility of expanding tho home industry. With stability it was possible for agriculture to plan ahead and dovelop its own internal techniques of production. If they were to absorb world surpluses in these islands thoy must dovise some technique so that it did not clash with the efforts of their ow n people. It was not enough to trust to the tides that flowed in tho world market for a reasonable price to the producer. Everyone was agreed that some regulation of imports was absolutely inescapable. The question was whether it should be done by quota, tariffs, ear-marked tariffs, or subsidies. Those were questions of method. NAZI RELIANCE ON GUNS Dr. Goebbels, Minister of Progaganda, in a speech in Berlin last month, referred to Germany's need of colonies and need of guns. "We are a poor nation," ho said. "We have no colonies, no raw materials. But we must tell the other nations that the time will come when we must demand our colonies back. It will not do that we continue to live as a poor country while the rest of the world is rolling in wealth. We are beggars. We are confronted with difficulties which we cannot overcoihe by interior methods. The others do not need the colonies which they have taken from us. We wish to remain neutral, but we understand that a nation like Italy must live. It is dangerous for the world not to concede such demands, because some day the bomb will explode. We can well do without butter, but not without guns, because butter could not help us if we were to be attacked one day. Some people say there is a world conscience which is the League of Nations, whose part it is to preserve the peace of the world, but I prefer to rely on guns." PROTECTIVE FOODS Some months ago Mr. S. M. Bruce, the Australian delegate, urged upon the Second Committee of the Assembly of the League of Nations the necessity of "marrying agriculture and public health in the interests of the latter." The suggestion was received with enthusiasm, sayE the Times. It has now been carried into effect to the extent of the recent production of a report by a commission of experts on the physiological basis of nutrition. The report is such that, if action follows, Europe and America are likely to enjoy a higher standard of fitness than has been known since the industrial revolution began. Briefly, foods are divided in the report into two main classes —namely, those which give energy and those which afford protection. The latter are the more important. The commission recognises that the deficiencies of modern diets are usually deficiencies in protective foods —that is to say in foods rich in minerals and vitamins. These foods, which are the more costly, are classified, in order of importance, into two main categories—first, milk and milk products, eggs, and glandular tissues, and, second, green-leaf vegetables, fruit, fat, fish and meat.

A RURAL CHARTER In the last few years the long period of neglect from which English agriculture had suffered has been ended, says the Sunday Times. Agriculture is no longer the Cinderella of British industries. Much has been done to help it, and although much still remains to be done the patient is markedly responding to treatment. Most of the treatment must be economic, but some part of it should be psychological: for the farmer and the farm worker have both felt the mental depression of neglect and suffered deterioration from what the jargon of the day calls "inferiority complex." It is not the least merit of the new bill for giving the benefits of unemployment insurance to agricultural workers that it should have some psychological advantage as well as economic. For too long the farm worker has felt that there was no future —in some instances no present either —on the land, that England does not care about her agricultural population; and in consequence men have drifted into the towns, where they get a dole if they are workless. The State should do something to stop this. Tho farm worker will bo assured of the means to keep himself alive when ho is out of employment. The State and his employer are to recognise their responsibilities and to combine with him in affording himself and his kind some sort of security. OLD ORDER AND NEW The discerning eye will perhaps detect one curious feature of our English life, says a writer in the Economist. The national family .is unbalanced. Owing chiefly to the evil days of 19141918 we.are a family in which tho elders still wield supremo authority, the elders who were in their prime before 1914. Between these elders set in political authority and the younger members of the family there is "a great gulf fix'd"—a gulf of almost two generations. Our country's rulers are between 60 and 75 years of age, whereas barely more than a century and a-half ago tho younger Pitt was Prime Minister of England at 23. United as a family on the surface, thorofore, wo yet have this division of authority, of interests, of outlook, of power even, which arises simply from the absence of "the war generation." Yet the time is fast approaching when, one by one, tho "old, familiar faces" will be gone. In industry, in trade, in the temples of finance and insurance, in the great corporate professions of the law and medicine, in trade unions, the press, and in the closer corporations of Government and the fighting services—everywhere the younger generation is knocking at the door. What will they do with tho power they so soon must wield? We cannot give an answer to this question, for we claim no clairvoyant gift of seeing into the future. But at least we know that the decisions that must be taken relate to a world far different from that of the generation that is passing away.