VOICE OF THE WORLD

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 71, 25 March 1933, Page 18

VOICE OF THE WORLD

The effect upon Irishmen in otherparts of the British Irishmen Empire of Mr. de ValAbroad. era's plan to establish

an independent Republic was discussed in a letter written to the "Irish Independent" by an Irishman resident in England. "There are over throe million people of Irish descent in Great Britain," he wrote. "In the days of the Homo Eule struggle these millions, very often against their own interests in this country, supported the Home. Eule movement. Their votes on occasions 'counted for, say, 80 or 100 votes in the House of Commons, as they represented the balance of parties in many constituencies, especially in the North of England. Their record of devotion to Ireland is magnificent. They and the Irish people abroad may assuredly be allowed something to say in the present crisis." He observed that 90 per cent, of the Irish people in England are opposed to the setting up of a separate Eepublican Government in Ireland, not only because they accepted the settlement of 1921, but also because they have experienced England's goodwill and fair dealing. "No Irishman lost his post or position, on racial grounds. The Irish working classes have not been treated prejudicially in this country by the setting up of a Free State in Ireland

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independent of England. .. . Irish workmen, Irish civil servants in England, Irish merchants, etc., have suffered in the slump, but no distinction has ever been made between them and the English of the same classes. It has been right through a case of share and share alike. ... If, as a result of the present struggle, a Eepublic arises, Ireland will have definitely lost three millions of her people in Great Britain. In the course of a generation or two these people will have become English. Do the present Free State Republicans value ties that bind them, to their own countrymen in Great Britain as nothing? The same is true of the Irish in Australia, New Zealand, Canada; and India. Mr. de Valera and his statesmen, do not appear to have even considered these matters." * # • * " When all the items in their external 1 transactions are taken into Overseas account there is now a Investment, credit balance due to the American people, and when to this sum is'added the amount of the debt instalments, the difficulty of making payment in any other form but gold is very formidable and the effect on world trade - very serious,'' says "The Times" Trade Supplement. "If the American people were willing to invest abroad the amount represented by their credit balance, there would be no difficulty, but so long^ as they do not invest abroad, the maintenance of a high tariff barrier clearly restricts the paymcn-t of debts duo to the United States and so cheeks the sale of American _ goods abroad. In the case of the United Kingdom the practice for many was to make loans abroad approximately equal in value to the amount of the. credit balance on the total oversea transactions. The difficulty of collecting this credit balance, therefore, did not arise, and as- each successive year added to the amount of these foreign investments there was, or should have been, an increasing sum due by way of interest and dividend. This amount added to the value of other invisible exports made it possible to pay for a vast excess of imports of goods and still leave a substantial sum. available for further investment. ... If and when the balance of trade is again in this country's favour it will become necessary to renew the practice of investing abroad. Let us hope.that it will be done with greater discrimination than in the past, and let us also' hope that the American people will soon realise that if they wish to have a credit balance they must be willing to invest it outside the United States,"

"To ascribe the main reponsibility for the present volume of unMachines and employment to the disManpower. placement of labour by machinery would be greatly to exaggerate the importance of this factor," says the "Economist," in reviewing the proceedings of a conference in Geneva on the Italian proposal of an international convention reducing hours of work to forty hours a week. "The predominant reasons for the present crisis level of unemployment are so clearly to be sought in a much wider complexity of factors— monetary, fiscal, and political—making up between them the disequilibrium and the paralysis of the crisis itself, that purely 'technological' explanations obviously are beside the mark." The writer quotes an, address by s(lr. Laurence Cadbury in which he drew attention to the fact that in British electrical' engineering and motor manufacture, to take only two examples, an increase in the number of occupied workers had accompanied rapid mechanisation and that progressive expansion of employment in distribution was a feature which resulted logically from a "technological" increase in the output of industry and served as a .counter-balancing factor to "technological" unemployment. "In bur view the stress which is being laid in some quarters on the post-war displacement of labour by mechanisation

and on the occupational and geographical immobility of labour in a period in which enterprise generally is stagnant, is an over-emphasis of temporary factors," the "Economist" adds. "The disturbance to economic equilibrium and the call made thereby on society's forces of 'readjustment which were witnessed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were, in comparison, far greater than the purely 'technological' influences at work during the past few years." ■.*:.*■ * Unqualified opposition to the destruction of any of the monuAbbey Monu- meats in Westminster merits. Abbey was expressed by the Dean (Dr. Foxley Norris),in addressing a meeting of the Architects' Association. 'He said he was perfectly aware that there were many monuments which ought never to have been in the Abbey. There was too long a period when, for a small payment, anyone could have a monument there. There were monstrosities, ugly memorials and inscriptions regarding undistinguished people and events, and some quite vulgar things. "But, remember," he said, "that we have in the Abbey what is unique in this country and, as far as I know, unique in Europe. We have a more or less complete category showing the gradual growth of taste in the matter of monumental memorials for the last 350 or 400 years. There is nothing like it anywhere else. Some of the things may bo very ugly, but that does not affect the question; they have their place in the gradual growth of taste in this country; they were the best that could bo done by the representative men of that .particular time. My main contention is that they should be kept together. I would never consent in any circumstances to one of the Abbey monuments being destroyed, because, however ugly we may think some of them, we have no right to destroy a record of that sort.''

"Trade may stagnate in a country both, because it is too Surplus full of people and bePopulation. cause it has not

~,,. enough," remarks the Morning Post" in an article dealing with the reversal of the flow of migration. "Great Britain and Northern Ireland support a population of 44J million people on 95,000 square milesCanada on 3,700,000 square miles maintains a population of 10 millions. Such comparisons, we admit, are apt to be fallacious; but if we take developed land as a basis, and use railway milage as a rough standard of development, Great Britain has 2271 inhabitants to every railway mile, against 238 inhabitants per railway mile in Canada and in Australia. It is reasonable to sup.pose, then, that in those empty countries an incroase in population would mean an increase also in employment; if, that is to say, the newcomers were put to effective work. There, indeed, is tho problem—to mobilise and organise our surplus population. In the past, as we have seen, it went on naturally: in Soviet Eussia, it is done by force. Is there a means between these two which statesmanship or enterprise might discover?"