AN OCEAN OF PAPER

Hokitika Guardian, 28 August 1920, Page 4

AN OCEAN OF PAPER

(From the Bulletin)

At Naples wo entered into starving Europe. But thore were few beggars in the gateway. It seemed to us that if Italy was starving she hid her anguish well. The streets were full of well-dressed men and women. The cafes full of wine and food and laughter, the marble fronted butcher shops hung with huge carcases like offerings to a lusty pagan deity. Signs of the late war, in which Italy lost 600,000 of her manhood, only appeared in an occasional mendicant carrying the tatters of a uniform about him, and in the deep mourning of many of the women, Khaki has disappeared, and in its place returns the dandy officer clad in the rainbows of peace, with azure cloaks like Homan togas and stripes three inches wide of orange, red and blue. But the first impression of general well being quickly fades. Naples is full of soldiers driving motor transports like thundering Juggernauts through the narrow streets, camping in the piazzas. Where are the fine white-glov-ed gendarmes? They give an effort of violent energy to a scene whose dominant character reflected in. the drifting crowds and pitiful food queues, is one of listlessness and low motrale. The big railway strike has just been settled with machine-guns. A strike among the shop assistants has spread to the steel workers, and there has been some shooting. To-day there is a general strike as a protest against the shooting and to commemorate the dead. Strikes are endemic. The streetcleaners, as the result of a successful strike, have just lmd their wages raised to the equivalent of 14s a day—they got about ninepence before the war. Wages in some trades have soared to giddy and fantastic heights, where the conservative mind reels in following. But their flight is a blundering one compared with the graceful upward sweep of the Cost of Living. Coke which in the cities is most used for beating Tuul cooling, cost 33s a ton before the war. It is now £25. Bread cost three times, butter four times, meat five more times than they did. Eggs in old days, a shilling a dozen, are now lOd each. Suits which were £5 arc now £35. A Gov-1 eminent, not otherwise overwise, has kept the cost of the national dish within reasonable limits, and macaroni has only doubled in price. Rents are now fixed. And yet, supplied with money, we find it cheaper to live in Naples than in Australia. A half-hour carriage drive costs us less than ninepence, and we may get a safety rapor for a shilling, while the ladies are buying six-guinea liand-emhroidered blouses for 30s, and silk stockings for 8. Moderately good hotels are to he found at 5s a clay, and pensions at 3s. This seems a great mystery. Its key is exchange. Exchange itself is a great mystery, hut let us not enquire too far into it. It is sufficient for us that for the credit established with each of our Australian notes we receive, doled out by a reluctant official as if lie were measuring out his country’s life-blood, incredible quantities of Italian paper. There are filthy little notes for one lira, worth less than threepence, and enormous parchment certificates for a thousand lira, worth about £l2. I l or£s we are stuffed like a wadded quilt; with £6O we are freighted below our Plimsell. If an ungrateful Mother Country had allowed us to bring gold we would have been submerged.

Certainly this paper melts like snow upon the desert’s dusty face. An average meal in jhe cafe made as big a gap in your stationery as it leaves a void in your stomach. The church door beggar sends rich curses after you if you give him copper instead of paper. What looks and feels to you like a penny is worth only a farthing,and it requires 15 one-ceut pieces to make the value of a half-penny. You feel at first your thousand lira, must float you dowD the streams of time for ever. You are quickly disenchanted. Still, you are infinitely better off than tlie native. That mysterious hut emnipotent deity, the rate of exchange for the day, miraculously turns your pound into three pounds, and with regal munificence flings you a few shillings over. The H.C. of L. has no terror for you. But the native enjoys no such supernatural largesse. His wages have been trebled, hut the cost of living has quadrupled, while his tenpenny lira is worth less than threepence when he is forced to buy in England, and about twopence halfpenny if he wants to buy in U.S.A. His currency fluctuates so rapidly that in terms of foreign exchange he may be a rich man one day and a comparative beggar the next, la n recent week the exchange varied from 72 to 90, then leapt to 103 (general strike in Tuscany;, dropped to 94 and 83 (optimistic speech by Finance Minister in Parliament) and rose again to 93 (general strike in Turin). It \s the same as if our Commonwealth Bank onepound note would buy us os worth of some great necessity. Only when the Italian merchant turns to Germany does he find a country so much worse off than his own that tho rate of exchange is turned in ills favor. The depreciated lira is a plutocrat compared with the attentuat.nl mark, which has been wortli at times less than a penny. And that is wily the Italians first of all the Allies, cry aloud for an immediate revision of the Peace Treaty. The economics of that document they say, may have been dictated by a stern sense of justice, but if justice was stern, she was also blind. If Mr Hughes were to expound his economic theories in Italy to-day lie would stand a fair chance of being stoned as a dangerous anarchist. For the logic of facts is more compelling than the logic of revenge or mortal indignation, and the logic of facts says that it is useless to try and milk a cow after you have cut her throat, and that a dead carcase will poison a whole dairy. Italy is convinced from its own great necessities that the Peace Treaty, if carried into effect, will perform the throat-cutting operation on Germany with efficiency. Yet, whether tlie cow’s throat he cut or not, it is now beginning to appear that tho business of getting the milk will present some difficulties. _ In a recent speech Nitti, the Italian Premier, voiced the new Gospel. He dared to utter the word Reconciliation. He said that there was more to he gained, morally and materially, for, Italy and Europe, in helping Germany to heal her wounds, than by thrusting

-fresh pikehends into her. Encouraged by what was apparently a universal shout of approval, lie declared that tho reconstruction of the late enemy countries was the sacred trust of Italy, which would he the 'vanguard of civilisation. This speech was rapturously applauded by the Italian Parliament, and a vote of confidence in the Government was carried by a triumphant nuiiority. Sobering to the imagination is a threepenny lira which used to he worth tenpencc that.Jingoes and Catliolico, Irredentists and Socialists alike hailed this doctrine with the affectionate enthusiasm of lifelong conviction. And gradually those who professing to lead, merely seek to reflect the opinion of tlie multitude, have been pushed on to declare that it is the -holy mission of Italy, which lias machinery hut lacks food, to hold out the olive branch to Soviet Russia, which has a surplus of food but lacks machinery. So potent an argument is a food-ration which is rapidly dwindling to vanishing point, that the party which a few months ago said there could be no making peace with tlie blood stained regicides of Moscow, applauded this utterance as if it were its own.

Before the war German industry and German organisation were considered indispensable to Italy. And Italy does not seem to have found anything to replace them. AVlicther it he true or not that during the war German airmen distributed disease germs amongst the civilian population of their enemies, it is certainly true that the diseased condition of the Germanic peoples is spreading a moral and physical contagion throughout Europe. And no sanitary cordon can prevent its spread, for it works through the world-pervading ethics of economies. To-day the exchange lias advanced against Italy another 10 points, and a rationing scale has been introduced in Rome which can scarcely keep body and soul together.