PUBLIC OPINION.

Hokitika Guardian, 13 October 1927, Page 3

PUBLIC OPINION.

PUBLICITY - AND BUSINESS. Why is it that insurance business should have increased in the United States during the past thirty years by 800 per cent, and in Great Britian by only 130 per cent? Tt is our own failing—publicity. AYe have the best managed and tiie soundest insurance companies in the world. None stand so high in prestige : none are so completely free from outside influences of a prssihly compromising character. But the same defect attaches to them that the British manufacturer suffers from—the defect of waiting for business to come along intend of ‘hustling round” to get it. We produce the best "sods in the world and depend largely on chance to sell them. -AYe can offer as attractive and dependable insurance politics as any country in tho world, hut wo cx-

poet the would-be-policy holders to discover them for himself. It is in this art of salesmanship, of making known, of persuading people to buy them, that British insurance, like many other of our enterprises, falls short—The “Sun day Times” (London.)

COMPULSION IN DEMOCRACY “Compulsion” is an obnoxious word to the Britisher. He is rightly jealous of interference with the freedom of the individual. Yet, in a complicated civilisation, such as our own, when it is to the interests of the community, compulsion has been willingly adopted. What reasonable Britisher objects to compulsion applied to sanitation, education, taxation, or lighting? The same principal has been extended by the “Insurance,” "Factory” and “Employers’ Liability” Acts. It is generally admitted that the most urgent task devolving upon the National Executive at the present time is the piscine; of the economic life of the nation on a firm and equitable basis. Arc the sufferings recently endured by our population to be merely a punishment for past ineptitude and apathy—or are they the necessary pains of a nation, in travail with a big and beneficent idea, to hear fruit in an epoch of industrial peace, the harbinger of a higher civilisation? Disraeli held that to divert a, dangerous public tendency into a safe and beneficial channel is one of the highest tasks of statesmanship.—J. H. Mini! in “The Fortnightly Review.”

TIIE BRITISH FARMER. “We believe with the Prime Minister that only by hard work, only by facing the facts and adapting marketing methods to the situation governed by those facts, can British agriculture he fully restored to that prosperity which will absolve the farmers fr-m a period of vigorous effort, accompanied by no very encouraging immediate return, are false friends and unreliable guides. That British agriculture will recover by its own initiative and not by any political aid.”—“Yorkshire Post.”