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Hokitika Guardian, 29 December 1932, Page 4

\ An explanation of popular opposition in tiu> United States to any revision of war debts lias been given, in a letter to tin- Times, by the Ttev. Dorothy F. Wili.iii, who .‘•■ivs: —"For the past IB months I have lived in America, most of the time in Chfernfa, and moved anir’-y HI ch'-'ses rf people. Tn answer to the frequent and rather irate inquiry, ‘Why doesn't your country pay Irr debts?’ I f.uu'd tlir.t three replies < 1 i l l more than anv others to destroy tlici.l- feelings of irritation and to give them some patience and unde standing. The first was to toll them that what they le it- to us was net gold, hut (roods; that wo should return it m goods if thev would let us, but that an gold whatever crossed the Atlantic from them to u s . I did not find one single persm (with the except ion of two or three financial experts in uni-

versifies) who- knew this, or was not amazed by it. Most of them have a mental ipirturo of their gold being brought up in vaist quantity s from their vaults, packed in .ships, and ti’an,-ported across ilio Atlantic; and another mental pir-tnie of us keeping a greedy hand upon their gold, which, if they had it hack, might help them to meet- the needs of their own destitute millions. It was a new point of view to them that they now had not only all their own gold, hut also much of that of the rest of the world. . . .

The .second reply was that, in our common cause, our country was called upon to make by far the heavier 'ssicriliee of men, of bone if our bone and flesh of our flesh. Could they not face, then, as their share of the burden, the heavier sacrifice of gold? The third effective reply wars simply to give them the figures rf what we are all actually paying in .income tax. The people of the United States respond to an aai>f.al for f?,T play; what they are smarting against now in this matter is a. sense of injustice, based largely on •1. nr’isaiiprober.s’nu as to what their loan to u,s -actually was.