The Christchurch Star PUBLISHED BY New Zealand Newspapers Ltd. WEDNESDAY, MAY 23, 1934. BEEF AND EMPIRE.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20312, 23 May 1934, Page 8

The Christchurch Star PUBLISHED BY New Zealand Newspapers Ltd. WEDNESDAY, MAY 23, 1934. BEEF AND EMPIRE.

THE ROAST BEEF of Old England is less often seen upon the British table because, in plain truth, the reduced national income from foreign investments leaves the British housewife with fewer pence to indulge expensive tastes. Last year London ate 10,000 tons less meat than in 1032, but while the Londoner’s weekly ration for 1933 included 3oz of British and Irish beef and I.Boz of Dominion beef, he consumed 14.60 z of beef from foreign countries. This does not seem very patriotic, but if England does not eat foreign beef, foreigners will not be so well able to pay the interest of her investments to allow her to buy the Id per lb dearer British beef. Moreover, when Englishmen are looking for reciprocal overseas markets the great opert spaces of the Empire do not offer the incentive for a heavy Dominion beef diet. A writer in “ London Truth ” puts this plainly enough:— An open space has its advantages, hut as the destination of coal and textiles it leaves much to be desired. However dis* agreeable it may be, the for British manufactures lie in the crowded cities of Europe, the United States, and even South America, which possesses in Buenos Aires, the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere, an opening for Britain’s produce with which she cannot eliford to dispense. One unpleasant truth, that the Dominions can send us more than we can ever consume, is balanced by the othpr one, that they can find no use for that which it is essential for us to produce. It might be different if they were content to admit our manufactures as freely as we admit their raw materials, but of this, unfortunately, there seems so little prospect that even Lord Beaverbrook has no hopes of it. Empire sentiment and economics do not mix easily, but in the rallying of London manufacturers against additional quotas there is a cheering blend of the far-flung view and convenient self-interest. WIRELESS BY WIRE. J 7 LEVEN YEARS AGO, to be Au exact, on May 7, 1923, a wireless message handed in at the Christchurch telegraph office for a passenger on the liner Maunganui was refused because there was no wire by which to transmit it to Wellington. That was the year of a storm which brought the land lines down, and if another storm occurred to-mor-row with the same damage Christchurch would still have to refuse wireless telegrams for transmission to any part of the world. This is a much more serious evidence of lack of progression than baggy trousers or any of the other little evidences of rusticity that Mr J. R. Cuningliam has discovered after his travels. And so is the refusal of the Post and Telegraph Department to provide a wireless telephone service for shipping at Lyttelton, a piece of departmentalism that Mr E. J. Howard, M.P., attributes to monopolistic fears. With such a service, which does not require operators on ships, the owners of the smallest vessels would be glad to equip their coasters with wireless telephones, thereby giving a voluntary measure of safety at sea which the late Mr Massey promised some ten years ago, when the Ripple went down, but which has not yet been insisted upon.

WORTH REMEMBERING. A S WAR PASSIONS COOL the Wm. events of the past range themselves in better perspective, but it would be most regrettable if pacifist propaganda should he permitted to gloss over ever so slightly the outstanding horrors of the Great War from the point of view of German brutality and the fate that befell that overhearing nation. And care should be taken not to defer too strongly to the views even of the Christchurch branch of the League of Nations Union in regard to certain facts about Germany that have been incorporated in a new school history book. A cursory examination of this book, to which wider reference might well be made, does not indicate any grave deviation from facts that may be appallingly brought home even to this generation by the war preparations that are going on in Germany to-day.