TEN MINUTE TALKS WITH WORKERS.

Taranaki Daily News, 28 February 1920, Page 9

TEN MINUTE TALKS WITH WORKERS.

! 3C-THE SANITY OP SOCIErY. Nothing is easier than to denounce society. The news printed in any issue of a newspaper will provide a hundred texts for a hundred screeds, all as much alike as the leaves on an oak tree, and none of them helpful. The idle rich are. contrasted with the deserving poor —idleness and desert being' taken for granted, and the trick k done. Now, clearly enough, to assert that society is all wrong is to assume that our forebears were all fools, an assumption not to be made lightly. For society as we have it was their work, being in part an unconscious growth from their ■habits and instincts as human beings, and in part the conscious adaptation of that growth, by lopping and pruning and grafting, to ends deemed to be so'cially desirable. Tho task of economic science, the practical result we should like to see issue from its investigations, is to ascertain in what limits further conscious adaptation is desirable and possible. In the meantime, there is a bigger fact to be observed than the famous "upper ten" at one end of the social scale, and the "submerged tenth" at the other, and that is the serried ranks in between—millions of men and women and children who do, in one measure or another, enjoy the comforts and amenities of life. If you live in one of our moderate-sized towns, which knows not the glaring contrasts of London, and where social phenomena can be seen steadily through a cleaner and clearer atmosphere, you will see if you observe things with p.n unprejudiced eye that, taking the broad results, men get out of society on an average and in the long run what they put into it. The mcehanisin of society is sound enough, and the social mind is sane enough, to bring about a fairly dose approximation of merit and reward. A man gets what he is worth, and that is all that he can rationally expect. Another point is of great importance. All over the world now, as you ponder over this telk, men are at work for you planting the tea you will one day drink, sowing the corn you will one day eat, shearing the wool you will one day wear, curing the tobacco you will one day smoke, and so on indefinitely. You can do none of these things for yourself. Unless they are now done for you, you will, in the short run, be on the rocks. These men do not do these things because they love you. To begin with, they do not even know you. They do them to serve themselves, yet they also serve you. In other words, society is sane enough and cute enough so to organise the self-i jgarding instincts of man as to produce results that could not be bettered very much at any given moment if men suddenly became what they never will be, absolutely unselfish and altruistic.

Again, as society is now organised, the results of failure come home to those who fail. There are exceptions to be sure, as the grotesque failures of certain (,'overnmeiit officials during the war, at Chepstow and elsewhere, bitingly re-! mind us, but the general rule is clear enough. Would you really like it altered? If a friend fails in business you are very sorry, and naturally do all you can to ease his fall and to put him' on his feet again. The ''friendly lead" is a standing tribute to the sweetness in human nature. But, on reflection, you see that the fact that the failure comes home to those who fail is a. powerful educative factor which society cannot afford to dispense with. One Chepstow is bad enough, but where should we be if the Clyde was lined with ''Chcpstows," and all that happened was a debate in the House of Commons? Observe that it is not a question of abrogating the rule. That we could not do if we would, for no legislative legerdemain can make failure into success. The question is rather, Would it be social wisdom to alter it if we could? The answer is clearly in the negative. K. -iety, that is, is sane on this matter. Once more, we find it utilising the basic instincts of the individual, and organising them for the common good. Finally, as we can see. that the great body of society, is all right, we learn that, the line of advance is to deal with the part that is admittedly unsound. Nothing said so far implies, or is intended to imply, that undeserved poverty is to blemish for ever the fair face of society. Some poverty is the economic result of failure, but most of it is due to want of opportunity. There has been no failure because there has been no chance of success. It is in dealing with this problem that society has got to make a new and better use of its sanity. We all see that now, and are prep'ared to follow where the truth leads us. It will not lead us to Bolshevism. So far as that is an attempt to mend the economic fractures of society it has been a grievous failure—a total' wreck, not a repairing job. Mr. Justice Sankey is at one pole, Lenin at the other, and it surely re quires very little wit to distinguish the British architect from the Russian jerrybuilder. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, so far as is desirable, can deal with the "upper ten." The schoolmaster, if we will let him, can deal with the "submerged tenth." A more courageous sanity is all that is necessary. XL—OUR PLACE IN THE SUN. Take a globe such as your boy sees and uses in school, and hold it out at arm's lengtii so that. London is straight before you in the line of sight. You see, of course, just half of this miniature world, and that half contains four-fifths of all the land. London is the exact centre of the. great Jand-mass of the earth. That is our place in the sun. From the economist's point of view the countries of the world fall into Marions groups, with interesting features that are worth our consideration in broad outline. Tliere arc, to begin with, old countries and young countries. The economic age of a country is judged by its advance towards the civilisation and economic structure of our own, which, rightly enough, we take as a standard. For it was in England that the Industrial Revolution began and first, ran its courseMany of you have seen the iron railings round St. Paul's Cathedral. They were made in the Surrey ironworks, in oldworld foundries, built there to take advantage of the forests of the Weald, which word means "wooded part" Within a century young King Coal had come into his kingdom, and the industrial North began its career of conquest over the world's trade. When next you feel the earth tremble under the blows of a [Nasmyth hammer, forging the keelplates of ap Acjuitanifl., ihin.l? of Abjnger

Hammer, in Surrey, still ons of our beauty spots, but no longer, as ita name imples, a centre of the iron trade. Industrially England has grown old since the days of Sir Christopher Wren. INVESTED WEALTH. Then there are creditor countries and debtor countries. As our country got old and wealthy other countries came'to her to horrow capita] to develop their own industries. For countries, quite unlike ladies, want to grow old, because it pays. And we made so much money, and had such a tremendous advantage because of our earlier start, that we were in a position to finance industrial developments all over the world. For example, we .built the earlier railways of America and most of those of tiie Argentine and Canada. Before the war we had about 5000 million pounds sterling invested abroad, roughly speaking, half of it in the Empire overseas and half in foreign countries. Argentine is a typical debtor State, paying the interest on her debt mainly in meat and wheat. A great part of what we had lent to the United States years ago as locomotives, rails, and machinery we got back again during the war as munitions. The obligations of the indemnity will justly make Germany, which before the war was rapidly becoming a creditor country, the chief debtor country of the worldAnother very important distinction is between manufacturing countries, on the one hand, and food-and-raw-materlal-producing countries on the other. Before the war we took the first place in the other, and after the war our position will be pretty much the same. It is a very satisfactory position as long as things go well, for it means that we are doing relatively higher and better-paid work. But it is a ticklish position, and if things do not go well serious trouble comes, and comes at once. The tT-boat campaign showed us that only too plainly, and now that peace has come we must not forget the lesson. Serious and prolonged industrial trouble, for example, would destroy the nice balance on which we carry on—and there is no alternative,

A STARTLING FACT. lastly, some countries are thinly peopled in proportion to their resources and some are very thickly populated. Hero is a striking fact which you can turn over in your minds with great advantage:—lf all tho people in the world emigrated in a body to the United States, that country would rot be as densely populated even then as England alone is to-day. That fact will bear thinking over, as you will clearly see. So much for our place in the sun. It is second to none. Look again at your globe. You can just see the tiny red patch that stands for our country, yet in pride of place, as in\ pride of race and history, it leads the .van. It goes without saying that we hold that place because we have become one of the most highly and delicately organised communities in the world. It is with countries as it is with living things —evolution and progress depend upon an increasing complexity of parts, each of which can perform its own function and no other. We have carried the process farther than any other country, and that means that the danger from dislocation is correspondingly greater. We produce only a,small fraction of the food and raw materials we require. We sell abroad a very large fraction of the manufactures we produce. The economic machine works very well. Its social results are not perfect, and we are purposing to make them far better, but, during that process, we must keep the machine going at full speed or danger will be at our heels before we know where we are. Even in a vast, thinly-peopled, lowlyorganised country like Russia social revolution has, meant economic disaster, and the lesson is obvious. There must be no "monkeying about" with our economic machine lest it should stop dead. . l