Open-air Economics.

Press, Volume LXVII, Issue 20169, 23 February 1931, Page 10

Open-air Economics.

There may be something in fresh air [that goes to a head and makes him uncommonly reckless; but this does not excuse the very wild talk of Mr D. G.' Sullivan at an open-air I meeting in Cathedral square, reported in The Press on Saturday morning. Some allowance may also be made to a speaker following others, who have already announced that the time has come for " the man of extreme views " and have very nearly forestalled him with visions of workers " driven from " their homes," of single men " already "being brutalised," of children being " strangled and throttled by the hands "of the dead,'? and of a "money " odtopus " squeezing away horribly at the country. The temptation to accept the role of extremist must be great, and all the greater because sense is apt to sound very dull after sound and fury about Chinamen and Hindus, usurpers, Karl Marx, less to feat, and business men in sackcloth and ashes; but if it is impossible to resist either the influence of the air or tho incitements of currency reformers, it is more discreet to stay quietly and pensively at home. The next best thing, perhaps, is to sit quietly and pensively at home and wonder why things that sounded so well from the top of a lorry look liko/nonsense in print next day. For example,' Mr Sullivan cried out that at the bidding of the wicked Tory Party, which had no other remedy, Mr Forbes waa about to take the clothes off children's backs and the boots off their feeti Thia is, claptrap, and will not stand translation into plain English, Ipecause it is so plainly ridiculous to say. that the Government is going to spread wholesale and abject destitution' hy paying them a little less but ritill as much as the country can, afford. Yet that is what Mr Sullivan's image means,- although he knows quite well that the only people Who are destitute or in- danger of Restitution are those who have no work, and cannot get W«rjc; and that the prime object of reducing costs all , round is to givd them worfc <So much," as Mr Sullivan says, for thp' economics" of the " situation." So much, at any rate, for. the economics of the open air and the extreme views of -a .motor-lorry. But Mr Sullivan closed on an ethical ««t Stion * "But what of tho ethics? „ * ? should the workers, the builders of the country," he asked, *be the 'first to be hit?" They must fight the> damnable injustice" of this first unmerited blow "as they've never jfought before," It is a pity that ! this fine rhetoric should break on the conci"ete fact'that tho workers are not the-flrst h|t,J but the,last. , The merJa^ t, the small trader, tho shareholder, me farmer, the taxpayer, the mortgagee aU been fcity and are being hjt; somerof thjam have 1 been crushed, others, hara * • The y may not/ „ ™ ajtoflAble injustice "on Mr S^l P S^ ignore the? m«y ihtelt it shows an absence of taind. ' '