GERMANY’S NEW BATTLEFIELD.

Hokitika Guardian, 15 September 1923, Page 4

GERMANY’S NEW BATTLEFIELD.

| VAST INDUSTRIAL CAMPAIGN.

, LONDON, July 20 I Colonel R. K. Morcom, a director of Messrs Beiliss and Morcom, Ltd., the engineering firm of Birmingham, expressed himself to a Daily Mail rcpiesentative thus : “My view has been all along that the war is nbt finished,” he said, “and that therefore if is highly important to keep our alliance with France. I have felt that Germany simply

transferred the battlefield, and that she is working out, through her manufacturers, an extremely artful campaign against us, both by making tremendous preparations for a big industrial programme in her crucial industries, such as electrical engineering - of which I know most—which is being extended to a position quite beyond what it held before the war; and by the depreciation of the mark—so long as her people will stand it—a very dangerous weapon, to herself. But as long as she can keep her people quiet, she will use it and allow the mark to

depreciate, partly as a means or keeping licr labour down to as low an economic position as possible and partly as a means of frightening the over-seas financiers, who are absolutely terrified by the mark’s depreciation declaring that it is dreadful and must lie stopped. “If we had spent the energies we spend in proving that wc ought not to try to get reparations from Germany in showing how we could get her to pay, our economists would have worked to much hotter effect. They have

produced u lot of brilliant paradoxes in order to advertise themselves; told people think, by drawing these paradoxes, they can establish a reputation ns economists. “Anybody who has done propaganda knows the value of a ealchwoid. Economists spend the time in\enting catchwords instead of tying Germany down to her bond. “I think if we had supported Franco _ . v _ i.

iti the Ruhr us soon as she wont in j there, Germany would have given in . he lore now. j “1 have had many suggestions as to ' ways of extracting reparations out of Germany with the least hurt to ourselves ; hut 1 have never published these anywhere. One was that it 1 should he perfectly possible to arrange ; that no British national should be able to carry out a legal bargain with Germany unless he used a reparations : bond as currency, lie would have to buy such bonds through his own Guv- | eminent and the German Government j would take steps to ensure their ne- ! ceplnneo by their own people as legal I tender. It would enhance the value I of the foreign hond. } •‘Another suggestion I put forward !at the end of 1021, and since then it i has been invoked not only from Franco \ but also from Belgium and Germany, I and that: was that on every debenture, j ordinary share, or security, of any | kind in Germany a twin should he j issued which would carry exactly the ! same rates as its original counterpart. | That should ho handed over to the RcI parations Commission and then sold | perhaps to the German Government lor to the German people themselves. I don’t think that idea would be so ro- | pugnant to Germany as people think, 1 because Germany lias bought out of the hands of British financiers most of her public utility companies. "1 sincerely hope we shall U* linn in supporting France and noi relax our lirrmiess until Germany has given us some security that she is going to meet her obligations to us, and that ihe form of these obligations will be ns severe a handicap to her in.inuiai I urors as our present taxation i„ to ourselves.”