Economic Changes

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 88, 8 January 1935, Page 11

Economic Changes

Sir, —In connection with your leading article of Friday morning, which dealt with the new policy of Mr. Bennett, of Canada, may I point out that his ideas bear a marked conformity with those expressed recently by Mr. Lloyd George. In the course of your own statement you allege that a change in the economic system is taking place, and that it is taking place without bombs and without Bolshevism.

Is that statement strictly true? For it seems that the events in other countries and the obvious danger of their being copied within the Empire have been the moving force rather than any spontaneous desire on the part of our own rulers to adopt a balanced system of distribution. Instead of there being an outburst of spontaneous desire, there has been and is an almost unendurable resistance to the pressure of that natural, that Divine, law which compels all things to answer to it, and which may be identified as the law of balance.

The change which is taking place has long since been foretold, and not the least of sucli forecasts was embodied in Mr. S. W. Fitzherbert’s little book, “Service versus Robbery,” published in New Zealand in 1917, and which is now out of print. Yet it appears to be true that Mr. Lang, of New South Wales, was the first, Mr. Bennett, of Canada, the second, and it is probable that Mr. Smuts, of South Africa, will ’be the third, Prime Minister of a British Dominion to express an intention to change, not to modify, our existing economic system. Disguise the fact as we may, the change whjch is taking place is the steady dissolution of institutions which are based upon usury or money capitalism. The first Prime Minister who has the moral courage to face the facts, and to dissolve actively and expeditiously the false institutions which threaten to envelope us, and who will institute a sound and equitable distributing system,, will be the first leader to bring.his suffering people into a land of sanity of both mind and body. For many long and weary years the controllers of the British Empire have suffered to run to waste the physical and spiritual energies of at least one-third of its effective manhood, and have evolved in the consequent state of despair and demoralisation almost the whole body of our youth, a great number of our women and a considerable portion of our aged people. Occupying, ns we do, so many hundreds of millions of acres of the most fertile lands on the face of the earth, it is not to our credit that, armed, as we are, with the most effective of all mechanical equipments, we have, so far, been unable to do better than to half-starve half our population and to create conditions under which liombs and Bolshevism and not faith, well-being and loyalty tend to become the moving forces. —I am. etc., P. B. FITZHERBERT. Wellington, January 5.