PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION.

Waikato Times, Volume 113, Issue 18930, 27 April 1933, Page 6

PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION.

“ The glut of production has not been accompanied by an increase of consumption, and this has led some observers to the despairing conclusion that machines, the wo'rk of men’s hands, have finally and hopelessly left those very hands empty of work in the future,” said Mr J. Beaumont Pease, chairman of Lloyds Bank, at the annual meeting of shareholders. “In the axwesting words of the president of the Bi’itish Association, ‘ the cornucopia of the engineer has been shaken over all the earth scattering everywhere an endowment of previously unpossessed and unimagined capacities and powers. But we are acutely aware that the engineer’s gifts have been and may be grievously abused. Man was ethically unprepared for so great a bounty. In the slow evolution of morals he is still unfit for the tremendous responsibility it entails. The command of Nature has been put into his hands before he knows how to command himself.” After 4 referring to what he regarded as encouraging signs in politics and industrial circles of a determination to overcome difficulties in a spirit of co-operation and a readiness to accept sacrifice, the speaker went on to say: “ I do believe 1932 was truly a year of preparation for better times. I am not afraid that man will be destroyed by a monster of his own making, or that he will he finally overwhelmed by a glut of goods he cannot use. “ History .supports me in the hope that the world will not and cannot logically be impoverished in the long run by an accretion of those things which constitutm-real wealth, even though there may be many dislocations of trade and hardship to individuals in the process of finding a better distribution of the product of men’s hands amongst those who so greatly desire them. “ These sentiments may seem to some of you to be too general in character and not sufficiently specific to give much _ practical ground for optimism, but the psychological factor is of great importance even in purely business and practical affairs.”