WHAT IS CREDIT?

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 18817, 4 March 1931, Page 12

WHAT IS CREDIT?

To the Editor of the “ Tlmaru Herald.” Sir,—Will you kindly allow me to make a few comments on two letters recently contributed to your columns by the New Zealand Welfare League. In the first of the two letters, the Welfare League, with impressive circumlocution, calculated no doubt to convey the idea of unchallengeable erudition, approached the subject of credit, asked what it was, defined it in,

a way suitable to themselves, and left your readers more confused than they had been before they read the letter, which, of course, it was the Intention of the writer that they should be, writing as he was in the interests of those whose motto is “Divide and rule.” He was simply doing his bit in his humble sphere to create confusion and division of public opinion, and prevent the farmers and workers from knowing exactly how things really stood with them. Should they know the truth, they would very quickly realise their strength, combine and pull down from the top of the scale the host of non-producers, who were now ruling the world, and become rulers themselves. For the benefit of your readers, let me say one word about this muchdiscussed thing, credit. Credit is of two kinds —bank credit and national credit. The banks use national credit, and the people and their Governments use bank credit. If the banking business succeeds, the banks pocket the profits; if it fails, the people and their Governments bear the loss. With the banks it is heads I win, tails you lose. This system is so obviously unfair that a movement is now on foot to have it altered; and the Banking Committee of Britain has recommended that the banking business be either brought under Government control or completely nationalised. The Welfare League writer makes much ado about the suggestion that the savings banks of this country should become the basis, for a start, of a national system of banking. He evidently is not aware that this has been recommended by some of the highest banking authorities in the world. Having finished his discussion of credit, he next attacks the question of arousing class feeling, as if it had not been aroused hundreds of years ago by the very class he now champions. This quotation from a sermon preached before King Edward the Sixth, while aptly describing both him and the class he represents, shows how class feeling was aroused, and how it continues to exist even in God's Own Country: “Be the poor man’s cause never so manifest, the rich shall for money find six or seven Councillors that shall stand with subtleties and sophisms to cloak an evil matter and hide the truth. Such boldness have the covetous cormorants that now their robberies, extortion and open oppression have no ends or limits. Poor men are daily hunted out of their livings; there is no covert or den can keep them safe. Such quick-smelling hounds have they that they can lie in London and turn men out of their farms and tenements, an hundred, some two hundred miles off. When wicked Ahab hunted after Naboth’s vineyard, he could not, though he were a king, obtain that prey until cursed Jezebel took the matter in hand, so hard a thing it was to wring a poor man from his father’s inheritance, which now a mean man will take in hand.”—l am, etc., ECONOMIST.