THE WAR AND BRITISH INDUSTRY.

Taranaki Daily News, 1 May 1917, Page 8

THE WAR AND BRITISH INDUSTRY.

Colonel George Harvey, editor of the North. American Review, 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 the January issue of his magazine ho< warns his countrymen against the illusion that supremacy in that world ia passing to them. He admits that the United States has made since the war a great commercial and financial advance, but lie points out that this has come about through no effort on the pari of Americans, and through no superior virtue of efficiency, but simply as the result of chance. The British, he contends, are fully justified in thinking that they caj get back their old position in the first ten years of peace; that they will quickly recover their foreigi markets and their sea-carrying business, and that London will remain the financial centre and clearing-house <ji flie world. This confidence is based mainly on the consciousness of the fresh power which Great Britain has derived from the "ordeal of war. The war has been, so to speak, "the stimulus as of millions of electric batteries to the minds and physical energies and the moral nature" of the nation. It has torn down the careless, slouchy stanards of peace, and has substituted for them the infinitely more exacting standards of a great crisis that cannot bo 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 tlio British industry as this war. For the past two and a half vc-ars tlie most inventive and most highly-trained brains in the kingdom have been placed freely at the disposal of the Government, and have applied themsel~es as never before to the problems of manufacture. Great Britain will emerge from the war incomparably 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 sympatheticas at this moment in -Great Britain; and the Barne brains that have solved the commercial and scientific problems of the war with conspicuous sucess. 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, tb&t have been erected, must be perfectly aware that .the British industrial future is assure* beyond challenge or dispute."