TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 114, Issue 19066, 3 October 1933, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

A Sense of Proportion. “ Do let us have some regard to the size of the problem before us and the volume we can put into that problem by the expenditure of public money,” says Mr Neville Chamberlain, referring to the problem of expenditure on public works. “ Take for instance the situation in the United States. The national income in the United States in two years has fallen from 55,000,000,000 dollars to 40,000,000,000 dollars, a drop of 45,000,000,000. What is the great problem of public works contemplated there? Three thousand million dollars. It is a mere drop in the bucket.”

The Turn of the Tide.

“Just ten weeks ago I expressed the opinion that the turn of the tide had come in trade, though no rushing, flooding-in of the waters was yet to be seen or expected,” writes Sir Francis Goodenough. “Well, every bit of evidence that has since come to hand has justified that guardedly optimistic view.

“I believe I am right in saying that a very sure index of trade movements, the Post Office turnover, has shown plus figures under all headings since the beginning of the year; employment statistics point the same way; and from many quarters I hear of a liveningup of trade.”

President Roosevelt’s Campaign. “If you succeed in your Recovery Campaign,” a well-known American is said to have remarked to Mr Roosevelt, “You will be known to history as America’s greatest President. If you fail you will be known as the worst.” “No,” Mr Roosevelt is reported to have answered; “if I fail, I shall be known as the last.” The story, if true, is highly significant, comments the Sunday Times. Even if it is a myth it contains the germ of truth. For there can be no doubt that the experiment to which the President and his Brains Trust are committed is so big in its conception and so farreaching in its effects that, win or lose, the United States, economically and socially, can never be the same country again. If the plan succeeds, the “rugged individualism”—or “ragged,” ns the cynics now call it —for which America is famed will "have given place, throughout the industrial and economic life of the nation, to a new form of “controlled capitalism.” Industries will be co-ordinated and unified. Wages, hours, production, prices, perhaps profits, possibly even investment, will be subject to control or to some kind of organisation. Labour will find itself in a new relationship to employers. A radically reformed economic system will have been brought into being, under cover of a supreme and nationwide drive to lift the American people bodily out of the slough of despond into a new paradise of plenty.

A Disputed Promise. “Most Englishmen regard Alsace-Lorraine as a closed book, remembering only that those areas were seized by the Germans from the French in 1871, and retaken by France again under the Treaty of Versailles,” writes Raymond Hunter in “Europe To-day: The Danger Points.” “There are very few who realise that large parts of these territories are entirely Germanic in origin, race, feeling, and characteristics, and that, especially as regards Strasbourg and its surroundings, they are regarded by Germans as typically and traditionary part of the Fatherland. “On the other hand, wo have to remember that France has held the greater part of these fcrr'forics from a date not many years later than the sailing of the Mayflower to the United States” of /morion and the first settlement of the British in Madras and before the British were in Calcutta and Bombay. “ The Frenchman can rigidly claim that it is as reasonable to expect Britain to give back India to the native races or the United States to give back their country to the Red Indians as to expect France to give back Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. Thus two great and war-like nations both think (hey have entirely reasonable and sound grounds for claiming a territory which itself forms the main frontier between them.”