HELP THE DOMINIONS

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 2955, 15 December 1916, Page 28

HELP THE DOMINIONS

MR. BONAR LAW ON PEACE .CONQUESTS . GREAT BRITAIN'S ADVANTAGES That distinguished English statesman and' Leader of the House of Commons, Mr. Bonar Law, addressed a ! large company of English business • men the other day upon trade problems: arising out of the war, and how 'best', to utilise the economic strength ,!oi the Allies to defeat the common > enemy. Among those,present were the .. iHigh Commissioners for Canada and New. Zealand. • Mr. Bonar Law, in the course of his . address, said all business men must How consider the problem of trade (after the war. • They must not forget, (either, that we were still in the middle 'of war. Trade, however, had a part : in the war, and was one of the thief I weapons with which wo waged war. jln this respect our position resembled 'that, of one. hundred years ago, and , [that force which wore down the power iof Napoleon was again playing its jpart.- It used to be a taunt against ms that we were a nation of shopkeepers,- but the taunt was not repeated 'now.-. Our chief enemy had set up eh op., also, and boasted that his stock : was larger and better than ours. If We wero a nation of shopkeepers we at leasfchad our shop in the best possible position and island advantages for carrying on trade. A second advan- :: ;tage;vtfia!b gave us trading power in itho past was command of raw material, »nd to some extent we had that still, ibut not to the extent, wo once possessed it. We had the base of all industry, coal, and, taking the British 1 {Empire as a whole, we had advantages that would last for generations. iW&, were a commercial race in spite of defects whioh had prevented adaptation of trade to new conditions j in spite of that our people had a trading instinct, mnd .though failing in small_ tilings, yet in broad grasp of a question we had sever failed. Difficult as was the task; which confronted the Government in carrying on the war, the problem" ofreconstruction of our social life after .thenar would be as difficult and would face the Government in every.direction. iWe had turned our, ploughshares into Bpears, and the process would have to bo reversed. "We should have to adapt ourselves again to the arts of peace "as" wo had adapted ourselves to. the arts of war. How Cermany Used Croat Britain Mr. Bonar Law referred to the possibility that after the war there would jbe' special trade relations between ...xbose who were now Allies, that just •ns they wero now fighting, together, so , iafterwards they would be working together. That.was a_ view largely held .La 1 tho Allied countries.. There were one or two aspects of the problem which would command -universal, or almost universal agreement. One was - as to the position which tour German ■enemy would occupy in trading v throughout the British Empire in fu- ' fture. Ho remembered reading a book : i by a German economist, in which this ' ■passage occurred: — - "Where would be the German ' sugar industry, the textile, the '' iron, industry, now created throughout the German Empire, without ! the rich English . market always Teady. to receive our goods? On . the back of Free-trade England we have tried to grasp the trade of ' tho world." v - , 1 That' wtis- before the 'war,-and now !*vo. reoognise the truth of it, and that

wherever there wero German traders in London, Canada, Australia, or elsewhere, there was nlso a German political oentre. This war was launched upon the world deliberately, as a matter of puro" cold-blooded calculation, in the firm belief by our enemy that ho would win. It was not a question of what would pay us and what would not; we could not forgot these tilings; and whatever else might happen the resources of the British Empire should never bo exploited as they had been in the past by our German enemies. Wo must have within our own borders tho resources necessary for our defence. He did not believe that the people of this country would be satisfied with any system which left us dependent in our industrial or defensive resources \ipon any nation, and least of all Germany. A United Empire. The war had knit the Empire together as nothing but war could. There was always sympathy in the strongest degree between the Motherland and the great Dominions, but there was something more than sympathy now; there was the feeling that they wore one. He believed it was no exaggeration to say that we could not win the war but for the strength wo had got from tho great Dominions beyond the seas. It was not merely tho men sent us, though that was much. Wo knew from the first day war was declared that the resources. possessed by the Dominions would be available in the struggle. The people of the Empiro had realised that, whatever added to the strength of any part of the Empire added to'the strength and power ol the whole. . • . Before the war Russia, and_, to a considerable extent, Italy, ( were permeated by German , finance and "German business men. Riissia had paid for this in the war. After the war Russia would present an inexhaustible field for energy and goodwill on the, part of the Allies. In addition, problems as affecting the British Empire would have to be thoroughly examined in conjunction with the great Dominions. In this war there was an analogy to the struggle between Carthago and Rome. In that struggle tlie commercial nation went down before militarism. We were not going down, but it was not trad© that would save us. The war could only be won on tho battlefield, and his confidence was in this, that while in the past tlie commercial nation trusted to riches and "tho hiring of men, that was not true of us to-day. In the past we had shown that we knew how to fight when fighting came upon us, but never in our whole history had our young men shown greater, readier courage than today. • The Mother Country was old, but the spirit of the British Emyire was young. (Cheers.)