ENGLAND'S PROSPECTS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 3, Issue 721, 22 December 1933, Page 2

ENGLAND'S PROSPECTS

v;. , f y \ ' - i A FRENCH VI EW IOLD COUNTRY PROVES HER WONDERFUL POWERS. CRISIS NEARLY OVER^ M. Andre Siegfried, that most amiable and friendly prophet of dis,aster, is not now so sure of England's doom as he was in 1930, wh'en he first wrote "England's Crisis." Then he feared a grandly catastrophic shipwreck for us, say-s the London Daily Telegraph. In a revised version, he defines our danger ,as a "slow ibut persistent leakage" which our "unlimited powers qf adaptation" may yet stauch". His affection and admiration for us as a nation enables him gladly to adimit that: — i "As far as England is concerned th'e crisis is, if not over, at least under control; the greatest danger now lies behind her, no longer ahead. The Old Country survives and carries on, having proved once more to the world her capacity for defence and resistance. He is not niggardly in his praise of the behaviour of the population when England went off gold, in September, 1931: — i "Anywh'ere else people would have scramhled to savei what they could, and in the eyes of any man of intelligence, the situation would 'logically' have justified such an attitude. But .the average Englishm.au . . . did not g o to his bank and change his pound notes for tangible assets. He lost faith neither in his currency nor in his rulers. With calmness and discipline, and, above all, in perfect simplicity, he did what he was told to do." With which', having sufficiently "wreathed the rod. of critcism with' roses," M. Siegfried i*esumes his more accustomed role of candid friend. fOnly 75 per cent. of our good behaviour, he thinks, was due to our fine qualities; 25 per cent. was due to selfcomplacent lethargy — (to the lazy be■lief tha.t "England is safe, come what may." M. Siegfried fears that "the average Englishman h'as not been much altered by the crisis"; that, so far from learning: the lessons it teaches, we have allowed it to imbue us with a sense of false security. Prices Steady. The fact, for instance, that neither the adoption of a protective tariff nor \abandonment of the gold standard has raised internal prices is due, M. Siegried argues, t'o the world drop in pric.es. This has given the Englishman the idea "that the pound is certainly» not money like the rest, and that ordinary economic laws do not apply to so privileged a coin. It has now become the thing to say, and, indeed, to believe> that it is not the pound which has gone off gold, but that gold has gone off the pound. Most Englishmen have persuaded themselves that their money, even when it appears to fluetuate in relation to gold, remains the real measure of stability in the world to-day, since its purchasing power seems to be imperturhable." So, too, with our tariff. M'. Siegfried declares that we are living at the moment through " a regular protectionists' honeymoon." "Prices have not gone np — not yet! — .so England has all the advantages of the tariff without its drawbacks. Many are naive enough to think that it will always be so and that they can have proteotion without raising the cost of livmg." French Trade. Good Frenchman that he is, M. Siegfried is evidently no little chagrined at the l.oss of the English' market. He admits that Proteetion has opened up opportunities "not only for new, types of industry, hut also that this means anything more than "a spurt of prosperity." This preoccupation with the domestie market will cause the English to lose their "export complex, which is the very essence of their commercial genius"; and so restricted an outlook "may in the long run mean mediocrity and decline." And so from his immediately catastrophic prophecies of 1930 M. SiegH'ied has descended to a less vulnerable form of vaticj^aation. He now reserves his darkest pigments for the distant future. It is reassuring that the worst the revised version of his hook has in store for us is "to share the somewhat tragic destiny of the rest of Western Europe."