The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND FRIDAY. MARCH 7, 1930 RECORD UNEMPLOYMENT

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 915, 7 March 1930, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND FRIDAY. MARCH 7, 1930 RECORD UNEMPLOYMENT

A FIRM of influential sharebrokers in London has counselled **■ its clients to sell their shares in almost all of the British industrial companies operating in the United Kingdom and invest the greater part of the proceeds in American and Canadian securities. The reason given for this counsel of despair is the belief that Great Britain industrially is depressed beyond recovery and cannot reasonably be expected to regain its former industrial leadership. The financial Jeremiah who signed the circular was one of the expert advisers of the British Treasury Department at the Peace Conference—possibly an explanation why Great Britain fared badly at Versailles. Still, Mr. Oswald Toynbee Falk received an Empire decoration for his service on that occasion. Today, he deserves to be booted on the right place publicly in Trafalgar Square—not so much for his imprudence, but for the callousness of his advice. If Mr. Falk’s belief is well-founded, to whom or to what new class of “mugs” should his firm’s clients sell their share-holdings in depressed and doomed British industries?

It is not surprising that the gloomy stockbroker’s advice has been denounced by a prominent industrialist, Sir Arthur Duckham, as “absolutely unwarranted pessimism.” No one, of course, can dispute the stark fact that British industry is in a bad way these days, but there is also indisputable the greater truth that it is not yet down and dying. If due regard be given to the nation’s colossal burden of war debt and the extent of its losses on loans to countries which are not so keen as Great Britain to honour every bond, the financial and economic condition of the nation is sound enough to justify optimism. And a great deal of Britain’s trouble would vanish if less latitude were allowed to stockbrokers and gamblers with the life-blood of depressed industry. A stilt’ei* tax on the get-rich-quick class, which neither foils nor spins, and the luxuries it indulges in, would help considerably toward recovering the nation’s temporarily lost industrial leadership. For extravagance, as well as poverty, forces British industry to move on crutches. As Sir Arthur Duekham has observed, however, “British industries, for investors, are certainly as sound as American industries.” Though American cinema pictures and other American propagandists never disclose it, one of the most moving scenes on Broadway, as elsewhere throughout the United States, is the daily queue of unemployed men shuffling forward to soupkitchens and charitable doss-houses. Indeed, it is now admitted without boasting that unemployment has become a huge problem in America. There are at least three million potential workers unemployed. Tn the mass, this total is the highest number of unemployed today in any country. It is a typical American record, though it is not likely to be featured in the films for which 1 lie British Empire is pouring out hard-earned money. And if British people throughout their Empire decided to put into daily practice the idealistic sentiment of helping their own industries first, thus creating wealth and the power to establish more British industries, it would require many American mechanical calculators to enumerate the increase in America’s unemployed. It cannot be denied that Great Britain has failed lamentably in the past to compete with the United States and other nations in the fierce struggle for markets and an increased demand for firstquality manufactures and the kind of goods buyers want at a satisfactory price, and not merely the industrial products conservative British industrialists think should be bought for sentimental reasons. But it is by no means too late for Great Britain and the Dominions to learn a lesson in “boosting” and in battling* for prosperity. This year, for example, America plans to spend close on 880,000,000 in a nation-wide effort at retaining prosperity and industrial supremacy. And the President is the best “booster” in the United States. Idealism abroad, and practical business at home, is America’s policy. This may he selfishness, but the rest of the world falls for it.