British Finance

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21820, 25 November 1940, Page 4

British Finance

THE English economist, Mr J. M. Keynes, has not as a rule been noted for his cheerful view of affairs, nor has he been sparing in his criticisms of the financial policies of the British Government. The more significant, therefore, is the optimism expressed in his recent broadcast on British wartime finances. He first takes exception to what he terms exaggerated notions of the physical destruction caused by the air raids, and expresses the belief that “there is no reason why most people should not look forward to higher standards of life after the war than they have ever enjoyed yet.” Even the Government’s war costs, he says, are being met more adequately from taxation than is generaly realised, nor so far are there any serious indications of inflation. Far greater sacrifices will, in his opinion, be required of all in the second year of the war. Indeed, “this second year is, in truth, the first year of the real war for Britain.” Drastic measures, perhaps, along the lines of his rejected deferred-pay scheme, will be necessary in order to divert to war uses a greater part of the nation’s output and income if war expenses are to be met and price inflation avoided. So far, however, the nation’s financial position is well under control, nor is there reason, he feels —provided the requisite measures are taken —to anticipate serious trouble on this score. Mankind needs always a leadership equipped and disciplined for the right exercise of power, writes Basil Matthews in his new book, Supreme Encounter. The fact that the title of the executive heads of the two greatest totalitarian Powers in the Western world is one and the same—the Leader—is significant. High among the factors that will decide whether democracy will survive under the stresses of the contemporary world stands the question of developing and sustaining a leadership adequate to the titanic burdens that it places upon the shoulders of men to-day. This stress is greater in a democracy than in a totalitarian State, in that the leaders’ decisions and executive action must be sensitive to the needs and able to secure the consent of the governed on the one hand, and yet wise and adequate for handling situations whose complexity the multitudes cannot possibly grasp. Leadership, then, in the democracies must rest upon an education both of the leaders and of the people that gives them real underlying community of purpose, such as creates mutual confidence and a sure sense of direction. • • • • • You can never tell what a book will do next, writes Dr. Lynn Harold Hough. It will carry you on far journeys while you are sitting in your own home. It will freeze you with cold though you are in the tropics, and surround you with tropical vegetation though you are in the Arctic circle. Books will bring the great of the ages into scantilyfurnished attics and leave priceless jewels of human thought scattered around in the most povertystricken hovels. Really, it is quite impossible for us to say farewell to magic as long as books are in the world. Aladdin’s lamp with its wonderful slave has haunted the imagination of the boys of many civilisations, but Aladdin’s lamp is not a lamp, but a book, and the slaves of the book make the world over again, opening thousands of doors and guiding men out into unsuspected highways of knowledge and achievement. The place where the rainbow touches the earth and you find the pot of gold is a library. The man who enters a real library has the world at his feet.