Wairarapa Daily Times (Established Over 60 Years.) FRIDAY, 11th FEBRUARY, 1938. THE ECONOMIC FRONT.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 11 February 1938, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times (Established Over 60 Years.) FRIDAY, 11th FEBRUARY, 1938. THE ECONOMIC FRONT.

— “Care lias been taken/’ say the Viennese, “that trees shall not grow into heaven.” A hopeful thought these days,_ when the logical conclusion of individual national policies would appear to be collective disaster. Trees start towards the sky. 5 * They do not reach it. However, as the proverb acknowledges, that is because “care has been taken.” If care be taken, attempts to set breakwaters against the surge of aggression will not lose sight—as they now tend to —of weapons more decisive than battleships, and which indeed should form a new “first line of defence” hitherto intrusted. to navies. This first line is economic. The arming democracies seem to be forgetting that the situation to which they are preparing to direct cannon muzzles is one in which the strategy of economic action could be applied with as decisive effect. A danger of current military and naval preparedness is that it may divert attention from the possibility of checking aggression through collective economic action. The democracies may let go by default the prime strategic advantage which is now theirs by virtue of present circumstances of world finance and raw material supplies. Much of the vague disquiet certain sections of the American public felt because of the Administration’s refusal to

apply the Neutrality Act to the Par Eastern crisis was really due to knowledge that American interests were supplying Japan with the sinews of aggression against China and American rights there. Whether the neutrality legislation was adequate or not, it embodied a desire of a peace-loving people that economic weapons be used before military ones. To-day a growing sense of responsibility for world law develops where an unrealistic isolationism not long ago flourished. But there remains a demand that this responsibility be shared by the great financial and commercial interests whose profits in the past have not always allowed the purest and highest concepts of patriotism to guide their policies.