The Wanganui Herald. [PUBLISHED DAILY.] MONDAY, MAY 13, 1912. THE BLIGHTERS.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XXXXVII, Issue 13679, 13 May 1912, Page 4

The Wanganui Herald. [PUBLISHED DAILY.] MONDAY, MAY 13, 1912. THE BLIGHTERS.

The most serious drag upon the prosperity of New Zealand is the existence of the financial pessimist—especially the kind that has control of financial journals or is considered of sufficient prominence in financial circles to l ave his views published. Trade no sooner becomes buoyant, or industry no sooner recovers from Hie last attack of blighting prophecy, than Jeremiads flood the financial papers and the oracles and Cassandras begin to predict the usual woes. Unfortunately the

public receive these prophecies with a dumb and blind faith that no religious seer could ever command though his utterances might be backed by the awful authority of -his Deity. The trade sky might bo fair and the commercial barometer indicate a long period of prosperity, when possibly an attack of licer jaundices the outlook of one of the chief prophets, lie commences the wail; the small try take up the dirge, and a blight immediately tails upon all industry. ' The prosperity of a community does not depend upon tue plenitude oi the precious metals nor of surpiage or precious commodities. The most splendid, the richest, and the most efficacious element in the nurture ot national prosperity is that intangible thing conadeuce—confidence in the permanence ot prosperity and in the solvency of the units and of the great whole community. It costs no money, but the loss oi it atrophies the muscle and brains of trade, and va'ues fall by millions an hour. When the blighters begiu their howls people don’t ask themselves whether the prophets are really capable of forecasting the future. The British and colonial public have a groat reverence for things in print. The probabilities are that if the man who wrote the troubling screed had instead uttered it at the street corner he would have been called a fool, even if he could have secured an audience. But issue it in print from the sanctum of the mysterious "we" and the moneyed man becomes panicky and locks his safe, the energy goes out of industry, and we are again in the doldrums of the Great Depression.

It is a pitiful fact that the mollahs who claim the gift of prophesy are just now busily engaged in foretelling the impending scarcity of money and harder times, and they have, as usual, already to some extent brought about the stringency they predicted. They are taking it upon themselves to advise the business men of the Dominion to be cautious, especially in the matter of imports, as though individual traders did not know their own business better than their would-be mentors. The fact upon which they base their warnings is that lor some time our imports have

been of greater value than our exports. They hold the empirical notion that the whole sum of our exports goes to pay for our imports, and that when the latter are less than the former we are marching towards ruin. If this were true nearly every

nation in the world would have traded themselves and each other into a i oudition of the moat terrible destitution, for there are very few cases in which the exports reach the value of the imports, the difference amounting in wealthy countries, like Britain and Germany, to hundreds of millions. These countries, on the theory of the Cassandras, should now lie in hopeless pawn. The fact is that it is not possible to dogmatise with certainty on mere groups ot figures. The vast series of individual circumstances upon which the figures of a nation's trade are compiled are not shown in arithmetical formula. For all we know there may bo thousand., of traders investing last year's or a ser.es of years’ savings in increasing their stocks. It is a certainty that with the rapid growth of the dairying industry it has been necessary for great numbers o! people t.i import farmers' requirements many months in advance of sale. Tin seasons for gathering the wealth of tl-? soil do not always regulate themselves by the calendar, and there are many other elements in the matter that arc not revealed by peering into figures. Considering, too, that although the race has, figuratively speaking, been steeped in international trade for thousands of years, there is less agreement among mini as to the economics of interchange than there is about the composition of the stars, the Cassandras of the sanctum should be more modest and discreet. The most obvious and recurring facts are, however, that trade all over the world is good without the signs of boom that usually leads to

crisis; the market prices of all our commodities in the British markit arc very good, and all the omens point to a few years of prosperity if the pessimist will repent of his pessimism.