WAR PROFITS IN THE OLD LAND.

Taranaki Daily News, 16 November 1915, Page 4

WAR PROFITS IN THE OLD LAND.

Jlany newspapers and some of the periodicals of the United Kingdom have devoted much space lately to the discussion of war profits and the obligation that lies upon the wealthy landowner and coalowner and lronfounder and the big joint stock companies to turn over a substantial proportion, if not the whole, of their extra profits for the financing of'the war. The New Age, for example, passes some very mordant criticism upon the men who, while posing as patriots, endeavor to retain their huge war profits intact, and protest against the State's shocking interference with private earnings. A big dividend-drawer put in a plea for the distressful shareholders. "It is from profits," he said, "that the owners live, who must starve if they were totally abolished. How would it help to win the war , . . if all the banks, carrying companies and great firms of the country were bankrupt?" Upon this the New Age made comment: "Apart from the fact that the successful profiteering of these persons and corporations does not seem to be helping us iraich to win the war, the confusion of thought is almost startling. What in the world does it matter, in comparison with winning the war, whether a few thousand human parasites starve for want of their nutriment of profit? Certainly we should not he in favor of reducing even parasites to this extremity, there is such a device known as compassionate allowance. For the rest, however, if we were the nation, we should take it without the smallest sense of shame or even of obligation. They are little short of criminals, indeed, who can pocket profits during the eclipse of civilisation." As to the great landowners, the New Age would have a short, sharp way. Inspired by its wealthy backers, The. Times put in a plea for landlords. Tax everybody, it said in effect, but do not put a finger upon the great landed estates. "Consider—to take one example—the case of Lord Cowdray, whose Norman conversion of a good part of a farming country into a deer forest is comparatively recent. As things are," says the New Age, "this man will find at the end of the war that not a yard of his land has been lost to him and his heirs. Others will have suffered irreparable loss in business, in profession and in life, itself. The nation will be up lo its nock, in debt. Everywhere a yard of good land will be worth ila area in gold. Yet Lord Cowdray, who has never done the State a service for which he has not been paid, will emerge from Armageddon with all his thousands of acres intact. And The Times says we are on no account to put a burden upon him! Our own idea of the proper procedure is to take a proportion of the land of every great estate in the country and to sell it to pay off the war lean. No pacifist nonsense about the rights of private property in things should delay the roappropriation of national land at national need." And this broad and certainly radical view steins to carry widespread approval, only hardened by the tierce protests of the man of ten thousand and a hundred thousand acres.