HINTS FROM AMERICA.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4867, 19 August 1925, Page 4

HINTS FROM AMERICA.

OUR NATIONAL WELFARE. HARMFUL CHARACTERISTICS. Mr Norman Angell contributes a striking article to the “Spectator," “What Britain Might Learn from the New America.” In dealing with the question as to how “national characteristics harmful to national welfare can be changed,’ Mr’ Norman Angell states :— “A very deep-seated tendency with us is, to look upon the way in which society may work in a given particular as a natural growth over which the individual members composing the society have no real control ; to regard those ways as being as much a part of nature as the climate and the green grass. “The American looks upon society as a thing consciously made by the units which compose it; made by written constitutions, by consciously devised plans—‘a manufacture, not a growth,’ to invert, the Spencerian dictum. And if in a given particular the machine works badly, the. American’s first impulse is to change it, to make consciously some alteration, to do with it what he would with his motor-car if it did not work ; not to accept the thing as unchangeable.

“In some respects we are better situated to use certain of the instruments which the Americans commonly employ. The instrument bf publicity is one. Americans, have realised that advertising can be used to better ends than the selling of soaps and cigarettes ; that through its means a national habit can be changed, a tendency checked, reform brought about. “The instrument is easier for "Us to manipulate because the whole ol England, or Britain even, can be covered more easily from a single centre than is the case in America. Our Presjs is a better disciplined Press, and is, incidentally, a better Press. Our educational system, too, is capable of greater unity of direction (perhaps unfortunately). “We all know that the great mass of our people often show an ignorance of the simplest economic truth. And there is nothing surprising in the fact. For while we regard it as indispensable to give to every child born in the country a certain minimum of instruction about the commonplaces of history and geography, while we -deem it indispensable to teach it the names of the country towns of. Great Britain, the date at which William the Conqueror came, the number of King Henry. VIII.’s wives, the fact that the earth rotates on its axis, we have thought it quite unnecessary to give it any instruction at all about certain 'things that will touch its daily life far more nearly, as, for instance, the money in its pocket.

“Thus our' people know more of the mechanics of the heavenly bodies than of the social body of which they are part. Most of ouy population are completely ignorant of the working of the economic and financial machine which keeps them alive. Their knowledge of that is at the flat earth stage. Some simple notion of the function and nature of money would at least preclude, the crude mercantilism which is- at the bottom of half the fallacies of Protectionism and the notions of national commercial rivalry which now curse Europe. “For voters to believe that the earth is flat and that the sun goes round it would do no particular harm. For voters to believe that all economic legislation should aim mainly at ‘keeping money in the country’ and that the prosperity of foreigners is fatal to our own, is to expose us to deadly economic danger. Our educational commonplaces are still those of the time when it was felt that the economic notions of the ‘lower orders’ had no importance.

“The English employer complains that the workers lack the initiative and ingenuity possessed by the American workers. We must do in an organised and conscious w.ay what has been done for America spontaneously by its circumstances.

“To encouiage or to acquiesce in conversation in the wrong place is to do ill service even to conservatism. The chief lessson of the New America is that when a national characteristic has reached the point of standing in the way of national welfare, that characteristic need not be accepted as ordained of heaven ; that it can be changed, if only w*e .are convinced of the need and set about the task in the right fashion.”