THE WAR AND BRITISH INDUSTRY

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 28 April 1917, Page 3

THE WAR AND BRITISH INDUSTRY

Colonel George Harvey, editor of the North American EevieAv, is convinced that Great Britain will emerge from the war fitter than ever for holding her own in the world of commerce and finance. In th e January issue of his magazine he warns his countrymen against the illustration that supremacy in world is passing to them. He admits that the United States has made since the war a great commercial and financial advance, but he points out that this has come about through no effort on the part of Americans, and through no superior virtue of effieienty, but simply as tlic result of chance. The British, he contends, arc fully justified in thinking that they can get back their old position in the first ten years of peace; that they will quickly recover their foreign markets and their sea-carrying business, and that London will rentaln the financial centre and clearing-house of the world. This confidence is based mainly on the consciousness of the fresh power which Great Britain has derived from the ordeal of Avar. The war has been, so to speak, “this stimulus as of millions of electric batteries to tliy 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 the steam’engine has,” he says, “so revolutionised, so renovated, sent such an invigorating stir through the whole of the British industry as this war. For the past two and a half years the most inventive and most highly-trained brains in the kingdom have been placed freely at the disposal of the Government, and have applied themselves as never before to the problems of manufacture. Groat Britain will emerge from the war incomparatively better equipped and more efficient for all industrial purposes than she was when it began. Science and business were never so closely allied, the mechanism of production was never so well organised, the relations between capital and labour were never so syrapathcficas at this moment in Great Britain; and the same brains that have solved the commercial and scientific problems of the war with conspicuous success, will be at the service of British manufacturers when it is over, and will make them rivals in every way worthy of our best attention. Those who know anything whatever of the spirit of enterprise that permeates Great Britain to-day, of the extent to which, whole trades have been reorganised by the Government, of the miracle of industrial improvisation which has been wrought for the purpose of turning out munitions, and of the huge factories, equipped with the latest machinery, that have been erected, must be perfectly aware that the British industrial future is assured beyond challenge or dispute. ”