EMPIRE AS SINGLE TRADE UNIT

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 71, Issue 237, 6 October 1928, Page 13

EMPIRE AS SINGLE TRADE UNIT

VAST POSSIBILITIES Prominent representatives of British trad e and industry were among the guests of thc chairman and directors of Messrs J. C- Eno Ltd., at a dinner held at the Savoy Hotel (London) last month in celebration of the diamond jubilee of thc business. Lieut.-Colonel I’’. 11. Allhusen, chairman of the company, presided. Sir Robert Horne, M.P., toasting “Emp.re Trade,” observed that when our customers on the Continent fell away, that with our Dominions and Colonies had made up the deficiencies. Australia took £67.Uu0,900 worth of our goods every year, and, with New Zealand, bought from us in manufactured goods more than France, Germany, and Italy together.

It seemed to be assumed that the trade preferences those Dominions gave us would go on for ever, but a serious situation might be created if those preferences were withdrawn, for we should then take a sorry place in comparison with the exports America would send to Australia and New Zealand. Wc lived upon those preferences; without them our trade could not exist to anything like thc extent it did to-day. Thc United States were makinggreat efforts to capture those markets in a way that was not comprehended in this country, and were prepared to give tariff benefits greater than anything wc offered. Mr L. S. Amery, the Dominions Secretary, responding, said no longer was the whole world the market of 'ur

business men. The state of supremacy we formerly enjoyed had passed rrevocably. Though our technical skill and our organising capacity never stood higher, wc could not gaia such preponderating advantage in efficiency of production as would make up for the fact that our wages were from 50 to 200 per cent, higher than those of our Continental rivals. (Hear, hear.) We should have in this .ountry the finest home market in the world outside the United States, if we treated the British market as a home market and not as a common dumping ground. It was possible to develop in thc Empire a total production and a home market, at least four limos as great as that of the United Stat<*s.