MADNESS OF THE WORLD

Taranaki Daily News, 28 December 1934, Page 3

MADNESS OF THE WORLD

CHALLENGING ADDRESS LIBERTY AND PROSPERITY. CURING ECONOMIC ILLS. Sir Harry Lauder and many of the leaders of the Manchester City Council were present recently at the first public luncheon of the season of the Manchester Publicity Association to hear Sir Ernest Benn deliver a challenging address on “Liberty,” states the Manchester Guardian. Sir Ernest began by suggesting that our troubles to-day were due to the loss of the spirit of liberty, and not to details like the price of herring, the rate of wages in this or the other, the exchange value of the dollar, or exactly how many spindles should be destroyed to make Lancashire more wealthy. The winning of liberty through democracy would prove, in his judgment, more difficult than any of the previous battles with tyrant kings, but he suggested—as liberty was worth having in itself apart from the details—that we might be able to raise politics beyond “the sordid, materialistic, Socialist level of the 9d for 4d party.” But we were not concerned with what we could put into life; we were struggling to see what we could get out of it, and were at that moment in a thousand polling stations for “more for everybody.” It did not matter who paid for it as long as it was not ourselves. A WORLD OF “ROBBERS.” / The practical result was that instead of an occasional individual robbing another in the “good old nineteenth-century manner” we had reached the stage when whole classes robbed whole nations, whole nations robbed other nations, and all iy ere engaged in robbing the world. A simple thought like honesty was, he submitted, wholly incompatible to the conception of a State, the sole sovereign keeper of its own conscience, and- judge of its own actions. We were a people of dole wanglers and tax dodgers, and many of us were both. (Laughter.) Sir Ernest instanced the conception of a minimum wage as “a typical piece of modem liberty filching.” It sounded so good, it appealed to our sentiments; it had a superficial aspect of charity and kindliness about it, but, logically, it involved a minimum crop, a minimumsized potato, a minimum consumption at a minimum price by a minimum population. “You cannot get away in logic from those simple circumstances,” said Sir Ernest, “and if you do that sort of thing it is simply frivolous to complain when, presently, you have to move on to marketing boards, tariffs, and quotas; later on, to collective farms and Communism, until, eventually, you will peach the stage when no man will plant a potato except at the point of a gun. Look at the actual state of affairs to-day, all arising out of this conception that we can, by voting, cure economic ills. We can have a piece of Danish, bacon provided it is wrapped in Dundee jute and has been cured by saltpetre bought in the London market.” That was the position at the moment. There was some arrangement, better understood by his audience than by himself, whereby they might have cotton from Queensland which must only be used to manufacture cloth for Australia. But, so far as he had read the regulations, there seemed no provision for the Australian to buy the cloth when it got there. (Laughter.) Life was one long series of chits, forms, licences, permits, certificates, quotas, percentage formulae and other bankruptcy balderdash until all sane men were praying: “Give us back our nineteenth-century capitalism and our liberty.” MODERN POLITICS. Planning, as we were now discovering to our cost, he said, made things worse; the standard of life of the world went down lower and lower as the, experts and the bureaucrats did more for us. We had long suffered from Government interference; now we were afflicted with a far worse ill—Government help. Modern politics was becoming the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it existed or not, diagnosing it, and applying the wrong remedy. That arrangement suited the politician, because politics was the only trade where failure paid better than success. (Laughter and applause.) In the nineteenth century, which he claimed to represent,- they talked of “cooperation in freedom,” a proverb which left the Imperial Parliament and even the town council out of the matter, but with the most charitable view of twenti-eth-century social reform politics they could not escape the conviction that good works divorced from liberty and married to force had produced the present chaos from which the world was suffering. We had forgotten' our responsibility to the world and that whenever we did anything in the way of governing a hundred other countries proceeded at once to adopt every one of our silly la-ws. In those other countries, when they made a law, they could “buy ’em off,” which, thank heaven, we could not do here, but the result was that we had smothered the world -with a mass of “graft” and corruption. Sir Ernest’s last point and, he said, most serious indictment, was that by living in luxury in debt and leaving the future to pay the debt the incomes of our children were divided in advance as the result of our action. If we took Tom Paine’s view that “a Government at its best is but a necessary evil,” we should act “very differently to the way we have done since Mr. Lloyd George took us in hand some 30 years ago.” Mr. P. M. -Oliver, expressing thanks, suggested that Sir Ernest had given some a meal of bitter herbs, others a draught of veritable champagne, while others, and perhaps most, might be uncertain whether they had received bitter herbs or champagne.