The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 1919. FUTURE TRADING POLICY.

Taihape Daily Times, 9 January 1919, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 1919. FUTURE TRADING POLICY.

(With which is Incorpmated The Tai* hape Po*l t-fld WaUsaiWo News].

There is ample intelligence coming to hand trom England and America to make it clear that, the higa prices of many articles this Dominion has to import are likely to recede rather rapidly. Black and galvanised iron have been amongst the first of heavy commodities to exhibit a marked drop, and although cables indicate that other iron goods arc on the down grade from a price point of view there has been little or no response in New Zealand. Roofing and flat iron ar's' now plentiful owing to the British Government having released many thousands of tons of black sheet that had been held in reserve for war purposes, and manufacturrs are now taking orders up to any quantity for the galvanised corrugated and flat sheet. Shipping charges having broken in two and one half having gone with the Avar will further considerably affect prices of every class of imported goods, for it must not be overlooked that merchants dinned into the public ear through i Chambers of Commerce, Board of | Trade, in Parliament, and even j through Ministers and Cabinet, that I the high cost of living was largely the result of high shipping charges, and up prices continued to go. Fifty per cent, has been taken off these charges, but that does not appear to . have had any sympathetic effect on imported commodities poor people have ! to purchase. There is some gratificaI tion in. knowing, however, that the j price tide has passed the full and that j it is now on the| ! ebb, and consequently i there is room to hope for better price i days. The Dutch people are inclined to taunt Britain on its slowness in handling the new r conditions; they say that with all the talk made about rc--1 placing German trade British ma;nu- ' facturers are woefully short of any i action. While German commercial* ‘ travellers have virtually besieged Hol- . land, and the country is being flooded ' with made-in-Germany goods, no Briti ish traveller has yet put in an appear- | | ance. They are asking what has hap- j | pened to the British manufacturer, and j | they are wondering whether Germany I is to have no competitipn except in the i countries of Allies belligerents. It is | generally admitted that the British are I slow in such matters, but the comfort- ! ing addendum is, “They always get i there.” This is a statement not bor]ne ! out by experience or by history. The : great war just concluded is an un- , I answerable refutation of that claim; , ‘‘they always get there” is a dangerous j fallacy. They do not always get there. I Had it been otherwise there would ! have been, no war. It was the success ; of German traders in pushing Britain ' out of every country in the world, and I even off the very soil of Britain itself, i that made the war possible; no one 1 will deny that fact. Resolutions for | the future are plentiful and abundauti 1 y heralded, but what is Britain waiti ■ ing for? It may be pr-Mlcecd with rtrj tainty that if British manufacturers I are waiting for their nominees in ParI liament to pass laws compelling the j Empire to buy nothing but British goods they are doomed to failure. Germany put whole-soulled trust in the arbitrament of war, in force, but Ger- , many knew better, from study and experience, than to attempt even to introduce force into business, and her manufacturers all but scooped the commerce of the world. The only successful business methods had their origin in the days when barter first i began; there are no other; the value and attractiveness of the goods and the ability of the seller to proclaim their virtues in the superlative degree is the basis of all business. The buyer as well as the seller must have justice and be satisfied; otherwise the word business does not apply, it is a misnomer, and the term robbery would much more correctly designate the transaction. Germany has worked on j the ol <3. well-worn, never-failing prin- | ciplo of ‘‘small profits and quick returns,” while, be it said to our discredit, Britain has endeavoured to give the lowest value for the highest price, and whatever laws are enacted in connection with after-war trade must tend to reverse that disastrously abnormal interested growth on British trade or some other nation will, in the near future, have forced Britain into a similar position to that she was discovered in when Germany committed the error of forsaking conquest of the world by commerce, and started to accomplish

it by military xiieahs. It cannot be said that German trading methods were dictated by honour, but they were dictated by exigence: they alone brought success. It was not love and consideration for German manufacturers that the German Government enacted laws to provide for monetary assistance being given to them to enable them to take and 'execute orders they could not otherwise handle; it was because every transaction with other nations made Germany richer; the individual was helped simply because it benefited the whole community. In British trade we discover the opposite; all trade there is by the individual in tho interests of the individual solely. It is a trading system of the rich, powerful, strong trading individual crushing out the weak, killing opposition, leaving ah opening for that cancerous growth of high prices and huge, dishonest profits, which, in the past, made British trade an easy victim for Germany to push out of her way. It has been Untruthfully said that the war Avas a necessity to Britain, and that statement was based solely upon the fact that Britain had been worsted i<n trade by Germany. But it seems doubtful -whether private interest will not succeed in preventing the Empire regaining what was lost by a deterrance of the institution and practice of those trading methods Britain has learned from bitterest experience are those alone on which a successful world business can he established. We need laws, not so much for governing trade as for assisting trade; we want a suppression of the individual and enthronement of the communiy; w r e ue’ed a government that is sympathetic -with the small trader as well as with the large. It is to the community’s interest that all Small manufacturers should have reasonable opportunity of becoming large manufacturers, and 1 to accomplish this there must be trading banks which will finance any manufacturer in however small a Avay he may be, to accept and execute any order he may secure. The British Empire must encourage internal competition for extraneous business, for it is the foreign order profitably executed that builds up the Empire’s riches and greatness. If a Taihape producer sells a sheep to a Taihape man the town is no -better off; the money value is simply' transferred from one Taihape pocket to the other; the transaction does not ihi crease the spending power of the community by one farthing. But let the producer have plenty to sell in the English market, the money will come out of English pockets into Taihape pockets and so enable the Taihape seller to have a greater spending power to the advantage of Taihape Avorking people and shopkeepers. New Zealand does not becom'e one dime wealthier i by one trader practicing what should be regarded as criminal extortion on the other, hut we have to face the fact that individuals have been so adsorbed in robbing each other and the public that they have failed to note that the country is becoming rapidly poorer through spending more than it can afford from what it produces. Any after-war trade that does not go hack to primal methods of barter, giving , value for value, and depending upon “small profits and quick returns” for growth and progress, must result in extenuated class conditions. The striving to get rich quick by arbitrarily selling a one pound article for pohnds is subversive of th"> Empire’s best interests and can only result in national failure and decay. The robber must be replaced by the workr