The Empire's Greatest Problem.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 231, 1 December 1916, Page 7 (Supplement)

The Empire's Greatest Problem.

The conianding position held by Germany in synthetic dye production may be farther illustrated by a nineident 1 had at first hand from one who was concerned in the controversy. It was while the McKinley tariff was under consideration of Congress in Washington. An overwhelming majority were apparently bent on 'imposing heavy protective duties to encourage the establishment of the dye-industry in the United States so that they might become independent of Germany, then asserting a virtual monopoly. A correspondent of one of the German manufacturing corporations—and they are said to have had their spies or agents in every lobby of every legislative assembly in the world —reported what was being proposed. By way of reply the head of one of the largest dyte trading combines in Germany offered to demonstrate to any commission or deputation the futility of the course proposed. A deputation went to Germany and were most hospitably received at the great central works in the Rhineland. Having shown them over the various buildings, replete with the most modern machinery, the German director took the deputation into his private room and drawing aside a curtain showed them a little elderly man sitting alone among retorts and testglasses and all the paraphernalia of a fully equipped laboratory. "There," he said, "is a chemist who has been at his work for many years, and I have half a dozen others like him elsewhere. Prom time to time I give him a few kilogrammes of eoaltar and tell him to experiment with the object of producing better dyes than previously known. He comes at eight every weekday morning and sits there smoking and experimenting. He goes away about noon and lunches on sourkrout and drinks three or four big bocks of beer. He smokes and smokes. He tests and tests with minutest care. In the evening lie goes home and with his dinner has five or six more bocks of beer and half a dozen pipes of tobacco. And this has gone on for years without interruption except for an occasional holiday. Every now and again he announces some new shade which in time is placed on the market. It would be useless for you or any otherß to attempt to bribe ony of my employees, for even if successful with one or two ttere »•© yet octets!:P,g3gea in the various stages of development 1 and each department is dependent on all the others and retains to itself ' some secret of the manufacture. Any attempt to bribe the chemist himself would be as hopeless as to drain the Rhine. Furthermore eadh particular dye is specialised. Other houses in the same trade are equally successful in some other direction; and we do not compete with one another. Our businesses are all thoroughly co-ordinated. A GERMAN BOAST. j That is why I say it is useless for yon in America or for anyone anywhere else to attempt to exclude our German dyes. I do not care if you put on a thousand per cent. duty. " You would only have to pay it yourselves, for, although a high tariff might restrict for a time the demand in the States, we ban regulate the prices to 6uit ourselves; and before you could by any ingenuity or investment of capital discover and manufacture dyes like our newer German dyes, our chemists will have discovered others which you cannot do without, or succeed in rivalling for a considerable time.' That is why 1 Repeat it is folly to think of imposing heavy duties, for you cannot seriously affect our trade in aniline dyes, or for that matter, in many other directions. So come out and have a. glass of beer." As to dyes, Germany had so consolidated her trade all the world over, that when War suddenly sealed up her ports, the first to suffer were the outside countries—her former customers. In consequence the manufacturers of silk and textile goods in England, France, America, and elsewhere, had recourse to buying up at fabulous prices remnants of stocks of dyes wherever they could be found; and onlv slowly and painfully and inadequately have manufacturers outside Germanv been able temporarily to supply the sudden deficiency. In metallurgb science nlso, Germany's advancement has been prenominal. Here again th" initiative was with England, but here again England allowed Germany to profit. In I87&--about 50 years after England had started the aniline-dye industry—a junior clerk at the Marlborough Police Court, in London, Sidney Gilchrist Thomas by name, discovered a process for dephosphorising pig-iron. He hit on what was indeed a wonderful discovery, but there the wonder ended, unless it may be said that the wonder continued by England doing ilttle to utilise the discovery as compared with the zeal it was taken up in Germany. There it was exploited to a remarkable extent. A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY. It was in 1871, when France was beaten to her knees by the war brought on by the combined folly of Napoleon 111., and the diplomacy of Bismarck, that Germany decided on the annexation of French territory bordering on { the Rhine, us part of the war indemnity to be exacted from France. Bismarck decided, on the best advice then procurable, to annex the. eastern part of Lorraine as.being highly metalliferous. He drew a boundary which divided Lorraine into two unequal part* —the rich he took for Germany, the poor but picturesque lie left to France. (The war indemnity was fixed at five milliards of francs, equivalent to about. £210,000,000 sterling, tx-ides the lost provinces estimated at L'ol.ooo 000 sterling, but no doubt great'y und tvalued.) The ore deposits of the, annexed portion were immed'iiteh utilised. They were estimated to amount to six-sevenths of the who!:- in>n wealth of Germany at that time. In the year l Q c~ —lour years after th ■ annexation and th? year b-Tom Thomas's d'srovery- Germany extracted from the ore deposits of Fasten! Lorraine 711,000 tons as compared win a mere trifle wh'ch the Frenih bad mined befoiv the Franco-German War. But this was only like scratching the surface. In 1913, forty-two yearafter the annexation, and the year before the present war—the output from this ore-basin amounted to over 21,000,000 tons—an increase of nearly thirty times in the interval. Now take n glance at the most important development of this wonderfully rich a<lM ition to the wealth and power of Germany that is. with regard to STEEL PRODUCTION. Tt lias l>een stated officially tha.t in ]*->O, that is five years after Thomas's

BY GEORGE HUTCHINSON.

No. 11. (Specially written for this supplement.)

discovery, when the industry had become hi inly establishedI—that 1 —that the smel tings throughout the whole of Germany amounted to 2,500,(XX) tons. In 191;i —again the year before the present war —the smcltings had increased to 19,000.000 tons, about seven times ot which nearly two-thirds were produced by the process discovered by the Police Court clerk in the country which hr.d gone to sleep over his disenve'y while Germany had forged ahead. From the ironfields of eastern Lorraine the activities in iron and the production of steel had so extended on both sides of the Rhine that, although the basis of the wealth is iron, this part of Germany became and remains known as, the Rhinegold. The statement has been made on high authority—and 's probably true —that without the resources of that former territory of France the present War would have been impossibly' on the part of Germany.

Now let ut turn the page to another bit of .history. Bismarck's advisers in 1871 were, after all, not so'wise as thev thought. Great as was the wealth if the territory annexed, later investigation disclosed the fact that the deposits in "western Lorraine —the part which had not been annexed —were far richer than those in the eastern part, which had already started Germany on her career as one of the greatest manufacturing nation of the world. So, t was not surprising, but quite in keeping with the designs of Germany elsewhere, that immediately on the declaration of war she speedily overran and occupied in strength the basin of western Lorraine which beyond the boundary drawn by Bismarck, extends up to the range of hills that forms the outer defences of Verdun to the eastward — once lost, now happily regained. You may have noticed on tire war maps of this sector that the line of farthest German advance on the oast reached out to St. Michael on the River Meuse, almost directly in the rear of Verdun, and only about 50 miles distant to the south —an advanced post to which Germany had successfully clung throughout the war, and which probably went far in determining the German Headquarters' Staff to make the fierce and determined attack they did on Verdun in February last and contined on into July. THE CRUCIAL EFFORT. If this great effort, the result of which has been declared tio be the turning point in the War, had succeeded, Germany would not only have struck at Paris—the heart of France—but would have consolidated' her occupation of the new iron-field of western Lorraine. As it was, Germany, while pressing her advance, has been mining with intensive haste in that fresh field, which has in the most effective manner kept the furnaces of Krupp red-hot the last two years. Another typical instance of lioiw Germany traded to the disadvantage of England may be quoted : —England has allowed Germany to import in exclusive quantities the raw material known as monazite sand, from one part of our Empire, take it to Germany and there work it up into pure thorium compounds which make the gas-mantles that have dominated the trade in that article not only throughout the British Empire but everywhere else. It might be said that this did not matter as England must have been profitably engaged in other industries more to her mind. This wo'*T3 probably be considered a sufficient answer if Germany had been content to pursue her commercial activities in a fairly competitive spirit apart from ulterior designs against her rivals in trade, but we know now that throughout her aim lias been a selfish one of ultimate conquest aiming at the absolute control of all the avenues of trade. LESSONS NOT LOST ON THE ALLIES. These lessons, or warnings, howevei. haven ot been lost on the Allies. AH former theories have been cast into the crucible of war, and the practical yesult has been, the general recognition that the altered conditions of trade have demanded an entirely now policy. For one remarkable change, the pot'--cy of Free Trade—free to Germany, bond to Britain—has been discarded as inadequate in the circumstances. Some of its strongest advocates have admitted the necessity for a change in the principles of action. Besides unanimously agreeing upon the Resolutions already quoted, the Allies have recently directly been encouraging the establishment within their own borders of manufactories for certain specialise.! productions so as to render themselves independent of German supplies in the future. The English Exchequer, for instance, has already lent over a million sterling to establish a company known as " British Dyes, Limited,'' and has promised to endow adequately, schools of research. France is also moving in the same direction, and the other Allies will no doubt follow in time. But the Allies may be starting under some disadvantages in respect of their newly developed industry in dyes. Apart from the tact that practically unlimited supplies of certain lines ot goods are in Germany ready to be exparted, there is the probability that Germany ha* been implying on her rdiiK-ineiits in synthet:c combinations .-o that she will have attained further valuable discoveries beyond the l'ea :li of begiiuii i's. This, however, may only mi an' that the Allies will have to practise a certain degree of abstinence for a tiu.e until their researches will liav i made up the lee-way. KMI'IRK MEASURES. Be-n!c- the pvi uni:;:y ass-.-ta nee i) i r dv L! : v.'U by the lint'sh Exc!i' que.' to the I- und-.tt.e.i of the new dye n-cu-try, the Home Government has Ilent!;,- by proclamation inaugurate-.! another phase <»l protection by ■ nip »& ;;ig a duty ' f '-2 per ton en palm-nut kern-'s expat'-.I Irua her East Airem' oloiii, a duty \\ h.cb may be n mitted o 1 p'-eot that the kernel* a!" to be eru-hed ill Millie factory within the British Empire. This drastic sic.) i> directed against the nianufaeture it margarine wlrieh bad recently made imtn n-e advances in Germany and Holland. Australia lias taken th' bolder course of prohibiting the export- of zinc and spelter, except to British port- 5 . Spelter, being the essential basis in the manufacture of all brassware. -is. of course, indispensable n metal working; and oi spelter Australia produces the greatest quantity of anv country in the world. With keen foresight the Germans had captu«>d virtually the who'e future Australian output, but the Comomnwealth

in one act bus annulled all such contracts. So far, good! THE PRACTICAL QUESTION. The practical question is: What should the Allies —including ourselves as a not unimportant participant in the War —do to re-establish and extend future trade? Will measures directed against the present enemy countries' be enough ? There are the so-called "neutral*." —what of tWemP Let us assume that all enemy country manufactures are prohibited from importation into any pirt of the British Empire. It will clearly not suffice to confine that prohibition to goods exclusively manufactured in. or supplied direct from, Germany or her confederates. Germany could meet any such prohibition by dealing through so-called neutrals by branch factories; or by investment of capitil in businesses in these neutral countries. Indeed, she has already made preparations and arrangements '■ii that direction. THE NEUTRALS. Consider the neutral countries of Europe. With the exception of Spam they have not ceased to be in more or less direct and dajily l communication with the enemy countries of Central Europe, and it is notorious that German capital has been largely invested in the industries of Switzerland, Sweden, and Holland. As to Switzerland, the north-eastern cantons, with Zurien as a commercial centre, are almost exclusively German. The German language is their language and communication with the Fatherland is unrestricted. Across the Lake of Constance the great Zeppelin manufactory is situate and the aircraft are constantly exercising over the whole lake, although the boundary is supposed to be half way across. For all practical purposes north-eastern Switzerland »s a part of Germany, and will so remain. It may be considered a jumping-off plaoe for her trade-war of the future. The north-western caDt.ons are B'rench in feeling and effect, but France has never been a keen business nation, and her energies have ail been absorbed in the terrible war that lias invaded her beloved fields and largely paralysed her energies for trade. Southern Switzerland merges into Italy but she has never been a match for Germany n trade. Sweden, from fear of Russia is impelled to a friendly neutrality with Germany. Holland, to say the least, is distinctly indistinct in her attitude and presents some curious studies : n neutrality, with a roving eye to the main-chance. The old rhyme of the Anti-Jacobin carries the mind back a century and a half when again The fault of Dh'e Dutch Was in giving too little and asking too much. In Asia, China alone need by coloured neutral if anything with a yellow tinge. In Oceania, all the islandgroups are possessions of the Allies or under their protection, except the Phillipines and the Sandwich Islands, which, being possessions of the United States, may be ranked with America. (i'o be Continued.)