Getting Back to Work.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18899, 14 January 1927, Page 8

Getting Back to Work.

The "coal magnate" of a Sydney, Cable to-day who sees Germany in a few years "astride of the world" industrially need not be taken very seriously. If Germany is capturing the world's markets the world knowa about it, and- the news will not come 'nW-to Sydney—if indeed anyone knwi'what a "world's market" is. "We can be quite certain that those whose concern it is to watch any particular market are doing so and not making much noise about it, and that those who return from foreign countries With sweeping generalisations are merely sounding boards, in nine cases out of ten, for that country's propagandists. But there is one fact about Germany on which all visitors agree: the German people are working, working hard and working tenaciously, and as the whole world knows, working under scientific direction. Whether the same thing can be said of the British people or of any section of them is a little uncertain. Although it is dangerous nonsense to describe the unemployed of Britain as loafers and beggars, and n6t much more intelligent to assume, as so many people persist in doing, that there is no science in British industry, there has always been some justification for the popular belief that Germany works harder than Britain and less wastefully. Besides, everyone in Germany understands since the war that if he does not work hard he will be in tribulation to the end of his life, but it has never really got under the skin of the Englishman that his own case is almost as bad.. It sounds odd, and even absurd and brutal, when hundreds of thousands are on the dole, to say that the difference between the British and German workman is the difference between the rich man and the poo* man's son; but it is very largely true. Anything from a million to two million British workers have contrived somehow to live without working every day since the war. They have contrived to do it because the family to which they belong has great possessions, and has managed somehow to pay them an allowance. For we must remember when we talk about the anxieties of the Homeland that it has never ceased to produce enough to maintain the general standards of life, whereas no one in Germany except the very rich expects to live as comfortably as before the war. Indeed, the only really disturbing thought about England, and it is very disturbing in and by itself, is the number of young people who have hardly ever w.orked at all, but have, as Dr. Gibson says in an interview in this issue, learnt "to depend on what they can " obtain without working, particularly "if it comes from the State." That is by no means a reason why anyone should despair of Engiand. It certainly is, however, a reason why everyone should hope and pray—if praying is his habit—that the return of the whole nation to work will not be, much longer delayed, apart altogether from Germany's energies and intentions, and even apart from Britain's place in the sun or the markets of the world.