THE BRITISH EMPIRE

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LII, Issue 17154, 2 October 1926, Page 8

THE BRITISH EMPIRE

LONDON, July 29. Britain ’& quarterly finance returns, .just issued, show a falling oft in revenue of nearly £23,000,000 and a distinct. increase in expenditure, some of if. scarcely avoidable under the circumstances of the times. Her deficit for the period is a large one. The trade balance is against her. Next quarter’s figures, thanks to the coal strike, will be worse, and altogether the outlook is not over-promising despite tho sturdy confidence of foreign inations and the cheerful stability of exchange. It is a position which, if not immediately dangerous may in half a decade be dangerous. No further burdens can be safely borne by industry. Income lax on incomes just above the better-paid workman ’s yield carry imposts of 4/- in the pound. The war burdens are still there. The defence burden is likely to become heavier in the next half-dozen years, especially if there are big developments in the air. It is a position to be carefully watched, and it points one more Imperial lesson. Here, in narrow streets whose walls are coated with centuries of grime, millions of people are unloading millions of pounds’ worth of foreign products every week from ships which cost millions upon millions of British pounds. Millions more are manufacturing those products. Thousands are carting them up and down. Thousands more are putting many of them back on to the same old ships, and sending them back the way they came. It is a thoroughly uneconomic business from start to finish so far as Imperial trade is concerned. It does not pay Britain to have an increasing population fighting for work as ship-wrecked passengers do for places in a life-boat. Every Briton knows, it. It does not- pay the Au-s-

GENERAL RE-ORGANISATION NEEDED

Dalian buyer of woollen materials to lie charged 20,000 miles freight; plus the cost of British disturbances, plus; British taxation, plus the tieing up of capital in the goods for months upon months. Neither does the insecurity of the position pay him. If some hostile nation were to swoop down on Australia and New Zealand to-morrow the British Navy would bo her great chance of salvation. Every cut in the navy is a reduction of the national war insurance cover, and the time is fast coining when Britain will lie compelled to reduce that, cover Through sheer force of circum,stances, more especially as the -high wage idea has shown signs of being born here, ami the country may look forward to a, good many years of .industrial agitation, probably culminating in industrial re-organisation oil a basis of modified American and Australian ideas, involving considerably higher individual manufacturing costs per man employed. It is all very well to say that -the country cannot -stand this. Individualism is too lively a- doctrine to be crushed, and the country will probably find, ultimately, that either it must stand it or go down under the burden of its own discontent. The obvious remedy is a, complete reorientation of tho Empire; a. full recognition that the manufacturing centres should lie where the primary wealth lies; a regrouping of peoples in Australia and New Zealand and other Dominions, 'where they will have air and space and their basic materials right beside them, and by local manufacture and distribution Ihe cutting of double freight costs, which now rest, so heavily on the Dominions, and of taxation costs through placing a greater number of people on areas which can be more cheaply governed than in the crowded and continually re-organised cities of Britain.