BRITAIN’S NOTABLE LEAD

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19379, 31 December 1932, Page 17

BRITAIN’S NOTABLE LEAD

MR BALDWIN’S NEW YEAR MESSAGE SPLENDID TRIBUTE TO SOUND POLICY United Press Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright LONDON, December 29, Mr Baldwin’s New Year message says: The reward of the National Government’s stewardship is the restoration of the country’s affairs to a condition in which prosperity is possible, Britain will be in the forefront when the world advances towards recovery. PRIME MINISTER’S MESSAGE. SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE PRAISED. The Prime Minister (the Rt. Hon. G. W. Forbes) has issued the following New Year message: “The closing year has been one of trial for the very great majority of our people, but present indications give some grounds for hope that the coming year may witness a measure of recovery from the economic depression, which has so long held in its grip all countries in the world. The times have called and still call for the exercise of that British tenacity and pluck which we have always been proud to regard as characteristic of New Zealanders. If we continue to face the future with a calm determination, we shall certainly surmount the difficulties of the forthcoming year.

“With a full realisation that this spirit predominates, I wish all my fellow citizens a happier and brighter New Year.” THE OLD YEAR AND THE NEW. MR HOLLAND’S NEW YEAR MESSAGE. Mr H. E. Holland, Leader of the Opposition, has released to the Press the following New .Year message: “A happy New Year to every man, woman and child in the Dominion—and beyond it. I only wish that the goodwill of every New Year greeting could be translated into practical effect. There is none among us who will not devoutly hope that the year about to be born will bring to every home a fuller measure of prosperity and happiness than that experienced during the year now slowly dying. It is for the people in the mass to decide whether or not this shall be. “In the middle of last century, more than eighty years ago, Lord Tennyson published the greatest of all his poems —‘ln Memoriam.’ This immortal contribution to the literary splendour of the nineteenth century was without any doubt whatever made under the influence of the prevailing economic and political conditions, and its message still rings for the perplexed and threatened nations of the twentieth century. Famine—in part due \to the failure of the potato crop in parts of Central Europe and Ireland, but also prevalent where available food supplies were withheld—ravaged thickly populated areas, cutting wide swathes of death in the ranks of the people. Unrest, bringing national explosions, was Inevitable. The revolutionary wave that rose in France in the spring of 1848 lifted Louis Philippe of the throne, set up the second Republic, and swept across the Rhine provinces. The barricades were reared in the streets of Berlin, and the guns thundered there on March 18, when the Prussian monarch found himself compelled to yield, for the time being at any rate, to the demands of the people. In Ireland the people were dying faster than coffins could be found for their burial. In England want and misery, with no hope of Parliamentary redress, invaded almost every home of the common people, and the revolutionary spirit engendered by these conditions was finding a more or less menacing expression in the historic Chartist movement. Is it, than, to be wondered at that Britain’s greatest poet of the day should have envisioned ‘wild hours that fly with hope, and fear,’ or that he should have beheld 'Time, a maniac scattering dust, ‘And life a fury slinging flame.’ "The stanzas, ‘Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky!' embodied, as I read them, the great poet’s earnest protest against the widespread grief that was sapping the mind of the nation; the feud of rich and poor, the false pride In place and blood, class antagonisms that grew out of and rested on economic foundations; the want, the care, the sin, the old. shapes of foul disease, that were likewise economically founds tioned; the narrowing lust of gold, the wickedness of war, the darkness of the land! It was,- moreover, a call for a higher state of society—a loftier social consciousness: ‘Ring out the old, ring in the new . . ‘Ring out the false, ring in the true!’ Ring in the love of truth and right—the common love of good, the thousand years of peace, the Christ that is to be! "As I have said, that message still rings for the twentieth century. The conditions that called it forth in 1850 are intensified a thousandfold in the hours of daylight and dark between the passing of 1932 and the advent of 1933. The danger of national explosion was never greater than now; for it is foreign to both human nature and the British character quietly to allow

women and children to starve while plenty abounds. “Lord Melchett is right when he declares that, in a world laden with wealth, great masses of the population are living in the worst degree of poverty and in the most pitiable circumstances; he is right when he asserts that the world’s stocks of all the principal necessaries of life are greater than they have ever been before, and that the command which man has over the forces and resources of Nature is greater than during any previous period in history; he is abundantly right when he insists that there is not the slightest need for the appalling poverty that is now prevalent. What Lord Melchett says of world conditions is equally true of New Zealand conditions. Never in this country’s history have the Christmas bells pealed and the Christmas carols been sung to an accompaniment of such unparalleled want and misery as in this year of 1932.

“Likewise, never has any country presented a more amazing paradox; poverty and hunger of women and children in a land in which the necessaries of life are produced in greater abundance than ever before. Primary producers, manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers unable to sell their goods, are faced with bankruptcy and ruin in consequence. Families starving because they cannot purchase the goods which these others have to sell. Starvation in the midst of teeming plenty because willing men are denied the right to work and earn the purchasing power that would enable them to provide for the needs of themselves and their dependents. “This has been the bitter experience of tens of thousands of our people in 1932. Will the experience be repeated in 1933? That is for the people to say. What is happening to-day is wholly unnecessary. It constitutes the elimination of all the elements of common sense from our acts of national administration; it abrogates all that is best in our common humanity; it involves the negation of every ethic of Christianity. “The apologists for the existing conditions rest their case on a perpetuation of the age-long perversion that fate has ordained that poverty, hunger, and misery must be endured in the midst of plenty—that economic laws are beyond the collective control of the community. In some cases they rely on the monstrous falsehood that want and hunger, with no shortage of life’s necessaries, is the will of the Most High God. It is nowhere denied that production is greater now than ever before. The only problem is that of distribution; and that is no insurmountable problem unless we insist that the nation must continue to place the profit-making interests of the financial institutions and the money barons as a class before the interests of the people as a whole. On the day that we are prepared to enter upon a comprehensive scheme of industrial reconstruction, with the machinery of credit and currency systematically operated in line with the goods produced and services rendered, we shall take the road that leads to the solution of our distributive problems arising out of inadequate purchasing power. In this connection, Sir Basil Blacket is correct when, in his Halley Stewart lecture, he says: ‘ln view of what we have done with currency, and what currency has done with us in ttye past twenty years, we are all of us fit for the lunatic asylum.’ “The Hon. Mr Downie Stewart sees in the present situation the possibility of the collapse of the whole capitalist system. In my opinion, we are now experiencing a complete breakdown of capitalism, and there is no way out except by the road of social endeavour. Let the anti-social elements protest as they will, the choice is between methodical and orderly processes undertaken by the collectivity of the people and the earthquake and thunder of physical force upheavals. The deepest thinkers will stand for the social and consequently orderly methods. Tennyson sings: ‘Well roars the storm to those that hear

‘A deeper voice across the storm’— a deeper voice proclaiming that social truth and justice shall prevail. It will be well indeed if that deeper voice is heard by the nation as a whole.”