The Daily News FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 1933. “FIGURES TALK.”

Taranaki Daily News, 27 January 1933, Page 6

The Daily News

FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 1933. “FIGURES TALK.”

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Those who have followed the public career of Mr. Neville Chamberlain, Great Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, will not be surprised at his attitude in regard to war debts. Mr. Chamberlain sees no way out of the -present-economic chaos except by cancellation of these international obligations. He does not question their legality, he does not that Great Britain has made a bad bargain with her creditor the United States. The Chancellor has been noted ever since he entered Parliament for his “practical analyses of the various problems which have come before the Government of Great Britain. As Minister of Health he introduced practical housing schemes for relieving overcrowding, and he combined with a sympathetic desire to improve social conditions an insistence upon sound finance in all building schemes embarked upon by local authorities. He is said to have been largely responsible for the improvement brought about recently in the United Kingdom in. maternity hospital accommodation and the treatment of maternity cases, and here again the way has been made easy for those who are prepared to pay for professional advice if payment by instalment is acceptable, thus relieving public funds and removing from the patients the feeling. that they are receiving charity. Fore-

sight and broad vision combined with the knowledge born of many years’ training in commercial and financial affairs have given Mr. Chamberlain a highly successful Ministerial career. The success of the conversion loans last year was a striking tribute to the nation’s confidence in the “keeper of the national purse.” It is not surprising, therefore, that in reviewing the position in regard to war debts the Chancellor should take a “plain man’s” argument in urging their cancellation. More than a decade ago Great Britain suggested that course, but was overruled by her former Allies. Mr. Chamberlain takes the ten years in which England has been paying the war debt to America, and has been endeavouring with more or less success to collect the war debts due from former Allies, and her share of reparation payments from Germany, and makes a rough and ready balance sheet of the transactions which have taken place. The figures he supplies are unlikely to be questioned. They are fairly well known in all the countries concerned, and the result they indicate 'is as plain as figures can show.* The Chancellor proves by them that practically all the payments made to the United States have been made possible by sums advanced by the Republic to European countries. Germany and the other former Central. Powers borrowed to pay reparations, and their s . payment enabled instalments of the debt to the United States to be repaid. Advancement of loans is only sound business so long as the security upon which they are advanced is realisable if such action becomes necessary. There is grave doubt whether American investors have such security in regard to some of the European loans made by the United States, and in any case long before the war debts can be ostensibly repaid the margin of safety for further loans will have disappeared. In such circumstances Mr. Chamberlain urges that cancellation of war debts ■ is sound business for the Republic as well as farsighted statesmanship. “Figures talk” is an American commercial maxim. The British Chancellor has applied it in regard to war debts' as the appeal which is most likely ,to convince the United States that a change in its policy is imperative.