THE WAR AND BRITISH INDUSTRY.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 6, Issue 278, 25 May 1917, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE WAR AND BRITISH INDUSTRY.

Colonel George Harvey, editor of the "North American lleview," is convince! that Great Britain will emerge from the war fitter thai ever for holding her own in the world of commerce and finance. In an ptticle in a recent issue of his magazine he warns his countrymen against theillusion that supremacy in that world ; s passing from them. He admits that thf United States has made since the vnr a great commercial and financial advance, but he points out that this has come about through no effort on the pait of Americans, and through no superio virtue of efficiency, but simply as the result of chance. The British, he contends, are fully iust'fiel in thinking that tluy can get back their old position in the 'first ten years 01 peice; that they will quickly recover thiir foreign markets and their seacarrying business, r.nd that London will remain the financial centre and clear-ing-house of the «t ild. This confidence is based mainly on the consciousness of the fresh power which Great Britain has derived from the ordeal of war. The war has been, so to speak, "the stimulus as of millions of electric batteries to the minds and physical energies and the moral nature" of the nation. It has torn down the careless, slouchy standards of peace, and has substituted for them the infinitely more, exacting standards of a great crisis that cannot be met except by methods as near perfection as human ingenuity can devise. "Nothing since the introduction of'tho steam engine has,' he says, "so revolutionised, so renovated, sent such an invgoralng str through the whole of Bri'ish i the rast two and & half years the most inventive and rost highly trained brains in the kingdom have been placed frer>ly at tho disposal of the Government, and have a.rpl'ed themselves is never before to the problems of manufacture. Great Pr'tain will emerge from the war incomparably better equipped and more efficient for all industrial purposes than she was when it bejan. Science and business were never so closely allied, the mechanism of production was never 90 well organised, the relations between capital and labour were never sc sympathetic as at this moment in Great Britain; and the same brr.ins that have solved the commercial and scientific problems of the war with conspicuous success, w'U be at the service of British manufacturers when io is over, and will make them rirais in every way worthy of our best attention. Those who know anything whatever of the spirit of enterprise that permeates Great Britain today, of the extent to which whole trades have been reorganised by the Government, of the miracle of industril improvisation which lias been wrought for the purpose of turning out munitions, and ~,i the huge factories, equipped with the latest machinery, that have been ere- ted, must be perfectly aware that the British industrial future is assured beyond challenge or dispute."