TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 114, Issue 19117, 30 November 1933, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Big and Little Businesses. “ The industrial world,” said Professor Annan at the recent meeting of the British Association, “is finding that there is a limit to efficiency by rationalisation, that it does not always bring about the desired effect, and that it may bring about more harm than good. I have discovered signs of a reaction toward the mediumsized business, with a renewal of the personal touch between employer and employee which such conditions render possible. “ There has been a comparatively steady registration of companies with nominal capital under £50,000, but a considerable fall in tho number of companies with nominal capital of £50,000 or over. The fall i$ even more striking if the comparison is made between companies of over and under £IOO,OOO of capital. Although the volume of trade carried on by large-scale enterprise is enormous, it is doubtful if in the aggregate it is not equalled or even surpassed by the turnover of the vast number of small and medium-sized businesses.” What Society Needs. “More than a change of system, we need a change of heart. We need all of us to believe again in * being good.’ We cannot expect to find honest men to administer our affairs if tho majority of us have lost faith in honesty and ceased to practise it,” writes Helen Bryant, in the Aryan Path. “ A renewed faith is not a fantastic idea, a change of heart is not impossible. Man’s sense of values is always changing. Innumerable times he has placed such things as chivalry, loyalty, chastity, physical courage, religious belief above money, above life itself. By t man » x do not mean a solitary individual, but great masses of men. This is no time for the man in the street to throw up his hands in despair, it is the very moment when ho should determine to do his bit to recover the code we have temporarily laid aside. « a code of honour is, in a sense, the crystallisation of the truths we have slowly learned through long centuries of barbarism and semi-civilisation —that to trust oach other, be honest with each other, help each other is the only way the human race can truly progress, the only way it can survive. The Upward Swing. “ There are still many,” says the Financial News, “who do not Relieve that a recovery in trade has definitely begun and even more who refuse to believe that recovery, though slow in growing, is, in this country, already a year old. But no open-minded person, who scans the available economic evidence as a whole, can find it easy to deny that this country is very satisfactorily placed by comparison with what seemed probable in the middle of 1932, or that only a debacle in other countries can prevent the position from steadily improving. « it j* true that we have never had an upward swing of spectacular violence such as that which occurred in America in the midsummer months, and it may also be true that we had further to renscend from the trough of the depression than France did; but there is no country which lmd made steadier progress, or which, in comparison with 1929 conditions, is in a sounder position to-day.”