A CENTURY OLD PROPHECY

Hokitika Guardian, 9 January 1931, Page 2

A CENTURY OLD PROPHECY

LORD sMACAULAY’S ESSAY.

FORECAST OF DEPRESSION

An analysis of the business depression of 1P,30, with its prophecy for 1030 I'jv J.ord Macaulay, was published recently,,in the form of a full-page advertisement by the Harriman National Bank, as containing sound advice applicable to the present depi ession (writes the New York correspondent of the “New Zealand Herald”). This remarkable form of advertisement is reproduced in a similar manner by a national advertising agency, “hoping it mav contribute to liar-sighted think-

'flu? essay published in the Edinburgh Review in January, 1830,, has an extraordinary accurate application, although 103 years old, to the existing world slump. In part it is as follows :

“History is full of the signs of this natural progress of society. We see in alost every part of the annals of mankind how the industry of individuals, struggling up against wars, taxes, fam ines, conflagrations, mischievous prohibitions and more misehievious protec dens. creates faster than Governments can squander and repairs whatever invaders can destroy. We see the capital of nations increasing and all the arts of life approaching nearer and nearer to perfection, in spite of the grossest corruption and the wildest profusion on the part of rulers, “The present moment is or.o of great distress. But how small will that distress appear when we think over the history of the lost forty years; a war, compared with which all other wars sink into insignificance ; taxation such as the most heavily-taxed people of •former times could not have conceived a debt larger than all the public debts that ever existed in the world added together; the food of the people studiously rendered dear; the currency impudently debased and improvidentlv restored.

“BECOMING RICHER AND RICHER.”

“Yet is the country poorer than in 1790?. We fairly believe that, in spite of all the misgovernment of her rulers she has been almost constantly becoming richer and richer. Now and then there has been a stoppage, now and then a. short retrogression ; but as to the general contingency there can he no doubt. A single breaker may recede but the tide is evidently coming in. “If we were to prophesy that in the year IS3O a population of fifty million, better fed, clad, and lodged than the English of our time, will cover these islands, that Sussex or Huntingdonshire will be wealthier than the wealth iest parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire now are, that cultivation, rich as that of a flower garden, will be carried up to the very tops of Ben Nevis and Helellyn, that machines, constructed op principles yet undiscovered, will be in every house, that there will be no highways hut railroads, no travelling but by steam, that our debt, vast as it seems to us, will appear to our greatgrandchildren a trifling encumbrance which might easily be paid off in a year or two, many people would think us insane.

THE CRASH OF 1720. “We prophesy nothing; but this we say, if any person had told the Parliament which met in perplexity and terror after the crash of 1720 that in 1830 the wealth o'f England would surpass all 'the wildest dreams, that the annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which they considered an intolerable burden—that for one man of £'lo,ooo then living there would be five men of '£50,000; that London would be twice as large and twice as populous, and that nevertheless the mortality would have diminished to one-half what it then was; that the post office would bring more 'into the exchequer than the excise and Customs had brought in together under Charles II.; that stage-coaches would run from London to York in 24 hours ; that men would sail without wind ; and would be beginning to ride without horses; our ancestors would have given as much credit to the prediction as they gave to Gulliver’s Travels.

let the prediction would have been true; and they would have perceived that it was not altogether absurd, if they had considered that the country .was then raising every year a sum which would have purchased the feesimple df the revenue of the Plnntagents—lo times what supported the Government of mizabeth, three times what, in the time of Oliver Cromwell had been thought intolerably oppressive. To a'most all men the state of ■ things in which they have been used to live seems to he the necessary state of things.”