Why We are Poor in a Land of Plenty.

Waiapu Church Gazette, Volume 24, Issue 8, 1 August 1934, Page 1

Why We are Poor m a Land of Plenty.

THOUGHTS THAT TOUCH THE CONSCIENCE By the DEAN OF CANTERBURY (The Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson, D.D., B.Sc.) Trained ability as an engineer, wide experience of travel, and work m the Industrial North have enhanced the Dean of Canterbury's fine gifts as a Churchman. They have also quickened his social consciousness and made him a fearless and knowledgeable critic of social conditions. As the following article shows, the Dean is more than a critic. He is a man with a constructive message.. (From Reynold's Illustrated News.) I recall a story of a ship-wrecked crew adrift on a raft m a tropic sea. The sun blazed; the water failed. Maddened with thirst, at last they dipped their cans m the salt sea and drank, drily to discover that the water was fresh as a mountain stream. Unaware they had drifted up the mouth of the Amazon, and were surrounded m the hours of their thirst, by that which could quench it. Their torture had been needless. Just as .needless, too, is the torture we suffer to-day. As needless for parents to tighten their belts that the children may feed. As needless for Parliamentarians to haggle as to grades of child starvation, whether their dole shall be three shillings or two. Needless, just because we, too, are surrounded by an ocean of plenty, an ocean flowing around us unutilised on every hand. For capitalism, led to its undoing by the leading strings of an outworn financial economy, condemns us to colossal and ever-increasing waste. God has offered us unparalleled plenty m this year of grace, 1934; we refuse it, restrict it, destroy it; and then cry out that we are poor.

"IF THE PIPE-LINE IS CHOKED— PEOPLE DIE." We are like men possessed of a reservoir at one end and a parched multitude at the other, with only a small-bore pipe connecting the two, and utterly inadequate to convey the abundance to the need. Every conceivable thing is tried save altering the distributive pipe. We force water into the reservoir till it overflows. We dam up the springs. Our learned economists prove by all the laws of hydraulics that the pipe can carry no more water, but that, with time and patience, each particular drop ol water will at length flow through the pipe; m the meantime, or course, people must die. Wisdom would scrap the pipe. The pipe is the cause of the scarcity. The waste due to our antiquated distributive pipe grows now to such monstrous proportions and takes on such new and devastating forms, that everj 7 " man, woman, and child should i)rotest, for all are vitally concerned. We have long been familiar with certain forms of wastage due, for example, to outworn methods of production, to an agriculture which abjures science and clings to hand process when solar power is available. Sir Daniel Hall, the scientific adviser to the Board of Agriculture, tells us that the possible productivity of the soil has. been increased 100 per cent, m the last ten years, and urges us to realise that the machine might do m England what it 'bids fair to do m Russia. Our unutilised resources are the sheerest waste. There is, again, the wastage of foodstuffs which rot through bad storage, bad packing, bad transport, and bad marketing. There is the wastage, on a vastly wider scale, of costly advertising; of the reduplication of staffs m competing firms; and m all that struggle to "find work" as the only source of livelihood which forces multitudes into retail trade and leaves only one m every three of the workers actually making the commodities and the machines we need.

But over and above all this, and to crown our folly, as it were, is the new and criminal wastage which we now practise m restriction and destruction on a world-wide scale. Hero is the final absurdity. The absurdity of the man who builds a Roils Royce car and speeds it down to four miles an hour and then smashes the dynamo because the car's efficiency still embarrasses him. Wastage of restriction is sorriest of all when it touches, as it does, the larders of the poor and curtails such stocks as wheat, sugar, tea. In August last the World Wheat Agreement was signed. European producers combined to reduce their production from 80 to 50 million bushels. Thirty million bushels less than might be; three-quarters of a bushel to every man, woman and child m England and Wales. And why? Because we are sated with food? No, merely because the pipe which should convey the abundance to the need is antiquated and no one dares to scrap it. . . Europe is not, indeed, alone m the grip of this mad financial distributive economy. The U.S.A. throws nine and a half million wheat acres out of cultivation; nine and a-half million acres, one-tenth of the area of the British . Isles! Australia curtails her acreage by 5 per cent, to 7£ per cent., and she and the Argentine', by arrangement, feed cattle with a surplus which is refused to men. As with wheat, so with tea. In the year 1933 the tea producers of India, Ceylon, and the Dutch East Indies received orders to restrict their crops by a weight of 121,000,0001 b. That amount would have filled every larder m England and Wales with 121 b. of tea. The land was ready. The labourers were ready! The teapots were ready. But the financial pipes were inadequate. So men are workless and homes are tealess. The same story is also told of sugar under the Chadbourne Plan. Vital foods are drastically restricted, and it is the children who pay the price. A headmaster m a Salford

school a month or so ago invited a visiting inspector, at the end of a long morning's work, to drink tea. "I should love it,' said the inspector slowly, "though I am ashamed to drink even a cup of tea when I learn that so many of your children have come breakfastless to school." It was true. Restriction alone, however, proves inadequate. With wild hands we must sabotage what has been produced. A blasphemous and wanton destruction takes place. Wanton because the destruction of what others need is always wanton; and blasphemous because this plenty come from God. It is God's gift. God has invested man with new sources of power and new control over nature, and done it as was promised, m response to the sacrifices which men of science and inventors have made m the interests of truth. They sought His Kingdom and He added the things they needed. God has filled our garners full. We scorn His gifts; burn them, bury them, fling them into the sea. The destruction is criminal. Think, for instance, of this. The August of 1933 was hot and rainless. Liverpool children gazed m shop windows at oranges they would never taste. And even as they gazed a great ship, bearing a million and ahalf oranges from Spain to England, hauled to, flung her cargo overboard, and docked at Liverpool with empty holds. Is that a blasphemous waste, or is it not? The need was there, m multitudes of small and thirsty throats. The ability was there, m Spanish orange groves and British ships. But capitalist financial economy said destroy and we destroyed. Th© pipe had proved again inadequate. THE DESTRUCTION OF FOOD GOES ON I possess photographs from overseas. They shock me. Men are shovelling vast brown mountains into trucks, from trucks to steamers, and from steamers into the blue Atlantic waves. Vast mountains of coffee, created by the sweat and toil of men, sunk m the fathomless seas. Twentytwo million bags dumped m accordance with an "elimination" scheme at the dictates of our finincial economy,

. You must get hold of this horrible, sinister fact and visualise it. Suppose, sir, you stood on London Bridge and saw a man raise aloft a sack of coffee, weighing roughly as much as yourself, and then fling it from the parapet into the dark waters of the Thames. If you were half a man you would say, "That is a damnable waste," and a very proper use, too, of a very strong word. Supposing, however, that as quickly as. your wristwatch ticked off the seconds, he flung similar bags, one bag a second, into the waters, and never ceased doing it day m and day out, hour by hour through the whole of the 24; did it while the Spring flowers bloomed, while the Summer suns glowed, while the Autumn leaves fell; threw away the bags as the days and weeks and months passed, one bag a second for nine solid months on end, that is the destruction deemed necessary to "save" the coffe trade of Brazil. Every damnable thing — again I use a strong word m a strictly proper way— must be done rather than tamper with the inadequate distributive pipe. I simply dare not speak of the 200.-----000 head of Dutch cattle which are being slaughtered and destroyed at this very moment at the rate of 4000 a week because British, French, and Germans have decreed that dear food paves the road to recovery. Tin, copper, zinc, rubber, petroleum, jute, cotton, wheat, sugar, and what not besides, are restricted and sabotaged m a desperate effort to make the old pipe work. It can't be done. No, it can't be done, not even with the aid of wholesale destruction of coffee m Brazil, of oranges m Spain, of carcases m Holland or Scandinavia, of cucumbers m the States, or tulip bulbs m Holland, or of fish, or ships, or the yards that build them, m our own native land. No, it can't be done, even though, for this purpose, and for this purpose alone, the warring capitalist groups have put their enmities on one side and combined. They have failed. They are bound to fail. The outworn money economy which controls our distributive system makes failure inevitable. It is doomed; and unless we throw off its shackles, we are doomed along with it. (Auckland ' Church Gazette.)