THE BRITISH EMPIRE.

Waikato Times, Volume 99, Issue 16653, 19 November 1925, Page 10

THE BRITISH EMPIRE.

IS IT DECLINING ? A CHEERFUL NOTE. (From the New York Times.) A familiar antithesis with regard tu post-war Eurpoe involves Great Britain and France. The French Government is described as financially in a bad way, but economically the country is sound. The British Government is financially sound, but economically is in a very bad way. Britain's declining tiade, her staggering figures of unemployment, her recurrent labour crisis, have elicited from some Englishmen outcries of- impending national ruin—outcries in which onlookers at Moscow join with pleasure. Even among those who neither wish for nor expect the ruin of the British Empire there is little inclination to deny that the present condition of the British people is perilous. Under the circumstances it is odd but instructive that the cheerful note should be struck by an English Socialist who, on general principles, would not be tempted to underrate the mischief wrought by a "capitalistic" regime. Yet that is precisely the note struck by Mr Sidney Webb in his article on "The Grisis in British industry," in the October number of Current History. Mr Webb docs partly quarrel with the capitalistic organisation of his native land. It is his contention that Britain's ills are primarily due to an undue appropriation of the national income by what he calls "prior charges" —bondholders, rent, and royalty receivers, and mortgagees. Their profits have increased since the war, whereas wages, salaries, profits of working partners, and even the. dividends on common stock have been declining. Whether or not this is a sound diagnosis of Britain's ills does not for the moment matter. The interesting fact is that Mr Webb refuses to subscribe to the doctrine of a sagging national well-being In the total. He oontends that the national income is just about what it was in 1913—a peak year of prosperity. That would indicate a certain per capita decline, since there are now two million more people in Great Britain than in 1913, but no radical change. British exports are clown to 80 per cent, of 1913, but that means no relative loss; Britain's siiare of the world's trade is just what is was before the war. The aggregate frreign trade —"in which the imports are, of course, as useful as the exports"—is in volume the same as in i'.'l3. "This hardly looks like . decadence," remarks Mr Webb.

Unemployment is not to be explained away. Yet even here Mr Webb indirectly supplies an answer to those who see in the present industrial depression the beginning of the end of Great Britain. The unemployed today number about one-eighth of all wage-earners, "or a slightly higher percentage than in 1908-09 and 188 G, though probably a lower percentage than in 1879 or 1841." Here, then, arc four unemployment crises in the '•course of 85 years which not only 'failed to undermine the position of Great Britain, but from which she emerged into new and augmented prosperity. And there are counter-checks to unemployment to-day which did not I exist in anything like the same proportion formerly—"So effective is the provision made for them (the unemployed) in one way or another that the steadily falling sickness rate,. the declining death rate, the highly significant fall in infant mortality, the reduced percentage of children found hungry in school, and all the visible signs unite to indicate that the condition of the people is not worse than in 1913, but much better." Great Britain has long been the victim of certain social misconceptions. Before the war it was the fashion to draw the contrast between London's slums and a povertyless Berlin. The real difference would seem to have been that Berlin concealed her slums in interior courtyards, while London, in characteristic fashion, flaunted her Whitechapel and Limehouse. Far less attention has been paid to the fact that 2& years ago urbanised and proletarianlsed Great Britain had virtually the same death rate as the United Slates—about 16.2 per 1000 of the population. In 1923 the rate for the registration area of the United States was 12.4, and for. Great Britain (excluding Ireland) 11.4. Last year there was a rise, but practically the death rote has been cut down just as fast and to the same level in Great Britain as in the United States. These are fundamental factors of national well-being which would at the very least recommend a certain degree of caution in forecasting the decline and fall of the British nation.