Mr Amery and the Farmer.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19173, 2 December 1927, Page 8

Mr Amery and the Farmer.

We said yesterday that the most important thing Mr Amery is doing for the Empire by visiting the Dominions is encouraging us to work in harmony with the Homeland and with one another in order to keep the whole fabric strong and secure. But one of the most interesting things he did in Christehurch was to say, in the plainest language, that agriculture is the mainstay, not only of the British Empire but of all civilisation, and that "the "great problem of unemployment was "largely due to a lop-sided development of the secondary industries." There is the astonishing fact to begin with that in the whole Empire there are fewer white agriculturists than in France, though we have sixty-five mi}lion people whose staple food is bread, meat, milk, butter, and eggs, and whose clothes, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, are made of wool. And when he drew our attention to these things, Mr Amery was not suggesting that we should scrap, or tax, or otherwise hamper our secondary industries, but simply readjust our minds to the fact

that prosperity begins with the man on the land. It has to be remembered also that the man who said this is not only Chairman of the Empire Marketing Board, but a leading member of a Government which would long ago have granted substantial assistance to secondary industries if it had not pledged itself for a definite period to leave the tariff alone. But in this connexion Mr Amery was careful to point out that his idea of Empire Preference' had never been that it should be "a shelter for inefficiency," or something to "exclude foreign "trade," but merely sufficient assistance for industry to enable it to " grow "up and compete ultimately without "any Preference whatever." The Imperial Government would, he indicated, grant us enough Preference soon to "give a fair chance to our efficiency," but not enough to " bolster up our production if it is not efficient." Farmers have never been taught to expect more than this, or even so much, but they do expect, and must be given, the assistance from their own Government that consists in not being hampered.