POST WAR TROUBLES

Southland Times, Issue 20202, 13 June 1927, Page 8

POST WAR TROUBLES

IS BRITAIN DOWN AND OUT? Mr George Harvey, who was American Ambassador in London after the war, wrote an article some time ago in an American magazine, in which he dealt with the postwar troubles of Great Britain and her economic difficulties, a,nd expr Vsed the view that Great Britain was “down and out.” The Christian Science Monitor, which has its headquarters in Boston, but is also published in England and in other countries, obtained from a number of leading authorities in Great Britain a series of articles in reply to this view. These articles were published in a special supplement of the paper, and 21 of them have now been issued in book form, under the title “Britain Looks Forward.” They show that Great Britain, so far from being “down and out,” is recovering from her post-war troubles, that her financial position rests on an unassailable foundation, that her industries are reviving, and that the future is one to which she can look forward confidently. Sir Max Muspratt, president of the British Federation of Industries, in a brief article included in this volume, proves that Great Britain’s share of world trade is larger than before the war; Mr Cuthbert Maughan, the shipping correspondent of The Times, gives facts and figures to show that Great Britain’s shipping industry has held its own despite world-wide depression; Mr Edward Cotes produces authority to show that British iron and steel interests are sanguine concerning the future; Mr Walter Meekin deals with Britain’s vast coal resources, which are an assurance of continued industrial capacity; Mr H. Eric Miller states how the development of the development of the world’s rubber industry has been due to British foresight and enterprise; Mr Frank Nesmith, editor of the Textile Recorder, shows that Lancashire is well equipped to meet any possible competition in the manufacture of textiles; and Mr Philip Kerr writes of the enormously rich natural resources of the British Commonwealth of Nations. Sir Alfred Robbins, in a brief preface to the volume, says, “Great Britain can never hope for a return to the pre-eminence in prosperity among the nations of the world which she enjoyed in the closing years of Victoria’s prolonged and peaceful reign. She never indeed attained a greater height of comfort, cheapness, and complacency than when that venerable monarch, amid the plaudits of a worshipping world-spread Empire, celebrated her diamond jubilee. Yet those are wrong who fasten their view only, as men of commerce, on the increased severity of foreign competition, or as students of social progress, on the lessened wealth of the well to do, and the greater strain on the professional and middle class. Those who know at close hand the conditions of the people of 1897, and thereby can fittingly compare it with that in 1927, can best realise that, while speaking of the majority, the rich, so far from growing richer, have less margin for luxury, and the middle class have been straitened, the mass of the nation, despite every qualification, has become better off —better clothed, better fed, better taught, with continually growing promise of being better housed, possessed of greater thrift and protected against the extremes of poverty, through accident, ill-health, and old age, to a degree undreamed of 30 years ago. This is not the kind of fact to be heard from the street-corner orator or the armchair theorist, but it is known to every social student unpossessed of an axe to grind or a doctrine to bolster, and it is the one which causes Britain to look forward with hope and with confidence. The way will be hard and the pitfalls many, but the reward is assured.”