POINTS of INTEREST

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 138, 13 June 1931, Page 13 (Supplement)

POINTS of INTEREST

LOWER WAGES IN AMERICA. Recent reports from the United States describe notable progress in the reduction of costs ot’ production and selling prices tn rough lower prices of raw materials, economies in organisation, increases in productive efficiency, and salary and wage reductions. Last year the largest number of wage reductions reported by the Department of Labour was 133 in August; this year there were 335 in January. 228 in February and 175 in March. “Wage-cutting has been considerably more widespread than has generally been realised,” aays a recent issue of a trade journal, the Business Week. Basing its calculations on statistics supplied to the Department of Labour by 13,00 b firms, employing 30 per cent, of the manufacturing workers, the paper estimates that about 1,000,000 employees in this section of industry have suffered wage reductions averaging 10 per cent, in the past lb months. Farm labour wages have dropped 26 per cent, and the pay ot many miners, builders and “white collar” employees is known also to have been reduced appreciably. Over the whole field of industrial labour, the paper estimates, average earnings have been reduced through unemployment, part-time and wage cuts by approximately 20 per cent., while the cost of living has declined only 15 per cent. As an illustration of the axiom that hard times produce hard work, another authority states that in the latter part of 1929 bricklayers in the metropolitan district of New York were receiving 1 dollar 871 cents an hour and laying an average of 250 to 30 face bricks or 70l« common bricks daily. Now they are receiving 1 dollar 924 cents an hour age of 250 to 300 face bricks or 700 1200 to 1400 common bricks daily, an increase of approximately 80 per tient in efficiency. PURCHASING POWER. “Standards of living are determined. not by the number of dollars per hour or per day a man ig paid for working, but by w’hat he can buy with the total number of dollars he receives,’’ iars the National City Bank of New York in discussing the question of maintaining buying power. That depends, it remarks, upon preservation of the balance between the different groups of producers and ‘‘-onsumers. “If the price of labour or any other item entering into the cost, of manufactured goods >a too high in terms of what large Croups of consumers such as farmers ind producers of raw materials can pay, the mechanism of exchange is thrown out of gear, production slows down, people are thrown out of work and purchasing ability everywhere is curtailed . . . Perhaps the simplest statement of buying power is that it is the product of hourly wage rates multiplied by hours of employment, divided by prices of the things bought. The desirable high quotient must be sought through equitable adjustment of all three elements. It is as necessary to keep the man at work and to ■ell mm goods cheaply as it is to pay him a high nominal wage scale.” THE PACIFIST. “The modern pacifist is mainly the product oi succe&siul conquering nations who by war have added to their possessions and the wealth and honour of their citizens.” writes Mr Leo Chiozza Money in a recenuy published book on international relations. “-The good pacifist, iumseii profiting as an individual citizen of a nation which has collectively profited ny war, loudly exclaims against strife and demands to know why the nations cannot live in peace, lucre is lack not only of a sense of history but of a sense of humour. The con-queror-pacifist stands where he does and enjoys what he possesses by virtue of what was gained and prepared for him by his fighting forbears. He finds it difficult to understand that there may be other men in other nations and circumstances, the inheritors of toss and frustration, who deny the right of any treaty oi undertaking to deprive them of the opportunity, by whatever means, either to regain what has been lost or to enjoy some better share of the world’s wealth.” BRITISH JOURNALISM. Presiding at the 68th dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund, Mr. Winston Churchill said that no institution had gained more in power in the twentieth century than the press. No institution had woven itself more closely into the life of the people of all classes. While Parliamentary institutions had grown steadily weaker, the newspapers had become stronger and the press bad blithely consented to fill the gap caused by the subsidence of the House of Commons and the euthanasia of the House of Lords. All went well so long as this great machine of public opinion was not broken or injured in any way. But supposing something happened which broke it, were they sure that there were existing in all their stations all over the land men and women with the fouee of character and grit to mobilise the ideas necessary to maintain the life and to be the pillars ot our civilisation? That was a thing to think about. Mr Churchill added that no press in the world had the incorruptibility of the British pr.«s, and none was so fair and decent toward the private life of individuals. Nor was there any press in the world in which public men who were interviewed by newspaper men could more confidently rely on being treated honourably and not misrepresented or betrayed in the matter of personal confidences. Another speaker at the gathering, Sir John Buchan, said the real strength of British journalism lay in the vast amount of competent '’nonymous work.

THE BRITISH BUDGET. Commenting on Mr Snowden’s Budget, the Times remarked that the grand total of the expenditure proposed for the financial year amounts io nearly £890,000,000 without any allowance for supplementary cstim...es, which during the past year came to close on £15,000,000. To judge by the experience of the past uecade it appears not improbable that, apart from any borrowing for the so-called Unemployment Insurance Fund, the actual expenditure for 1931-32 may reach, or even surpass, the appalling total of £900,000,000. When the first Socialist Government tame into office Air Snowden budgeted for an expenditure of £790,000,000. Since 1924, therefore, he and his predecessor have added no less than £100,000,000 to the annual cost of government, in spite of the steady automatic diminution of certain liabilities, such as pensions, left over from the war, and iu face ot one of the sharpest falls in the. world price level which recent history I.as witnessed. The Estimates for 1924 provided for a total expenditure on the three defence services of £115,300,000, and a sum of £227,573,000 for the Civil Service Votes. In the present Budget the defence services account for the smaller sum of £llO,000,000, but the cost of the Civil Services has actually risen to close on £318,000,000. No doubt this increase of over £90,000,000 is less formidable than it appears. About half of it is due to the inclusion of the Government grants to local authorities, which have been raised by some £30,000,000 as the result of Air Churchill’s derating scheme; but the remainder represents a sheer net increase of almost wholly unproductive expenditure. In addition, the Government has recently been borrowing for the purpose of unemployment benefit at a rate approaching £1,000,000 a week. So far from doing anything to restore the finances of the country to a sound basis, all that Air Snowden has achieved is to postpone the evil day by appropriating the last remaining capital asset he could lay hold of in the shape of the Dollar Exchange reserve, in order to fritter it away on current expenditure. THE ENGLISH VILLAGE. The unique characteristics of the English village were emphasised by Mr G. K. Chesterton in addressing the annual meeting of the Preservation of Rural England Society. He said he had been all over the United States, and from one end of that vast an I magnificent civilisation to The other there was no village such al could be seen within a few miles ot London. The English village was a relic; it was even a miraculous relie, like the relic of a great saint. It was something that would not be replaced. Al! the things they took as perfectly ordinary—that solid look oi the village; the fact that the roofs and the walls seemed to mingle naturally with the fields and trees; the fact that they had a feeling that if they ever went to Paradise, or to some ultimate home of the human soul, it would be something like a human village; the feeling of the naturalness of the inn, of the crossroads, of the market cross—all these things were a very precious possession, and they did not exist all over this planet, not by a “very long chalk.” People talked about the Crown Jewels. These were in a real sense the Crown Jewels. These were the national, the normal, the English, the virtues of an archangel.” THE LAST HEREDITARY KING. “The abdication of Alfonso is much more than a personal or a Spanish affair. It is the end of absolute monarchy on the face of Europe, if not on the face of the earth,” Mr A. G. Gardiner wrote in the London Star. “Alfonso was ‘the fast leat upon the tree in the year,’ and now that he is gone hereditary absolutism ‘s dead from pole to pole. It was not until the Great War that the system crashed in Europe. The three despotisms on which the European structure mainly rested were swept away *nd with them went a dozen lesser monarchies. The Continent was, figuratively, littered with fallen crowns from the Rhine to the Bosphorus, ana to-day the whole of Europe and Asia, from the Straits of Dover to the Sea of Japan, may be traversed without once touching the territories of a hereditary monarch. It is unfortunate for King Alfonso that when ho came to the English Royal house for a wife he did not take back with him also the English pattern of monarchism. lie has come to grief, not because he was not, an amiable and well-intentioned monaivh, but because he sought to exercise a despotic personal power which the modern world will not concede to a here litarv rule even though he has the virtues of an archangel.” THE WEAKNESS OF DICTATORS, “Dictators have no way of adapting themselves to changing circumstances or changes of opinion,” Air J. A. Spender wrote in the NewsChronicle, in reference to the revolution in Spain. Their claim to have restored order or produced ‘efficiency’ is very often well justified for a time, but self-respecting peoples cannot live on having order reoffered to them or even efficiency the government of a clique, which, with its veto or criticism and censorship of the press, slips back into jobbery and corruption. After it has done its job of cleaning-up, dictatorship lives on its control o? armed forces, and. when that goes, everything goes. If. is the old story of having a wolf by the eats. It is also character!istie, of dictatorship that they interpret inability to resist as approval of their rule. Hobbes, in his “Leviathan.” has an ingenious argument to prove that the two are rhe same thing, but confusing them has been the way of disaster for dicta tors. 7 f