BRITAIN CHALLENGED.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 192, 14 August 1931, Page 1

BRITAIN CHALLENGED.

Facing Competition on All Sides. (Special to the “ Star.”) SYDNEY, August 8. “ Other nationals do not altogether appreciate the attitude of the average Britisher,” Professor Macdonald Holmes said during his address at the New South Wales Geographical Society’s general meeting. “ ‘Britisher,’ by the way is an American word,” the professor explained. “ Perhaps I had better say ‘ English.' Although I am a Scot, that will do! “ It is an attitude of pride, not to say complacence; an insistence on the adjective Great as applied to Britain, • and has been stigmatised as insularity. It has arisen from the 100 years’ supremacy in trade and arms accorded Britain before the war. Now that supremacy has been challenged.” The challenge, according to the professor, has come from all sides. “The United States has challenged England on armaments. She demands naval parity, insisting that the world be policed by an Anglo-Saxon navy. She challenges in manufactures, as does also Germany, France and Japan. Where England was the greatest coalproducing country in the world, she now has a competitor in oil, and she has no oil supplies of her own. The miner and his coal are not the necessary factor that they were even at the beginning of this century. Her shipping was once supreme, now her merchant lines have received a serious challenge from other lines.”

The professor pointed out that whereas England had a world-trade during all that prosperous century, she now had to rely on her Dominions for her trade to a large extent.