OTHER PAPERS’ OPINIONS.

Thames Star, Volume LIX, Issue 16626, 23 October 1925, Page 4

OTHER PAPERS’ OPINIONS.

THE CHINESE PROBLEM. Now that the disturbances in China are dying down, it may be of interest to consider what they sprang from and what they mean. It lias suited the Labour Party to represent them as a movement of native workers against foreign exploitation. That is a mistake; Labour is egregiously misled when it supposes that industrial conditions in the foreign mills are a main cause of the trouble. These conditions would remain far worse in the nativeowned mills if all foreigners were eliminated. Shanghai, the centre of the disturbance, with the great international settlement (in which British interests largely prevail), its adjacent French concession and Chinese city is the largest commercial centre in the Far East. The great wharves with their shipping, the imposing centres of business life, banking, exchange, export, import and manufacture, and the roads branching out in all directions to the residential quarters of Shanghai, have all been built up from nothing by foreign (non-Chinese) capital and energy directing Chinese industry, and are the outstanding expression of wliat the co-operation of East and West can accomplish under good government and wise policy. It is not the grievances of Labour that arp at the bottom of the trouble, air though these have been used for all tliev are worth by adroit Chinese politicians and tlieir foreign instigators. What the Western nations are facing is a great mass movement of Chinese nationalism, and serious concessions will h«ve to be made to it.—Hawke’s Bay Herald.

THE PRICE OF BREAD

The announcement that the Master Bakers’ Society in London lias decided to reduce the price of bread to 9d per quartern loaf-nerves as a reminder of the price which the New Zealand consumer pays for his bread. Whereas in Britain it appears as though the bakers bad been exploiting the publrc, charging more for the loaf than the price of flour warrants, in New Zealand the cause of the dear loaf is the failure of the policy of encouraging th.e growing of enough wheat to meet the Dominion’s requirements. 4+ his election campaign meeting at Opliir on Friday. Mr. Horn referred to the considerable outgoing of purchase money necessitated. He said that it ivas a disgrace that a country like New Zealand, which had the highest average wheat yield per acre in the world—3s bushels to the acre, as against Australia’s 14 bushels, for example—should have to import so heavily. He turned the facts to political account by attacking the alleged combine of manufacturers or handlers of artificial manures, declaring that a large part of the £lO per acre which it is said to cost to grow wheat was due to the oxpensiveness of fertilisers. He a iso attacked the present Government’s land administration for not subdividing large runs, many of which, he said, comprised country well suited for wheat growing. Mr. Horn himself says that it nays the farmer better to depasture sheep on such land than to crop it, and in that case it is difficult to see how more land is going to 1)0 brought under the plough by mere sub-division.--,-S+nr, Dunedin.