EMPIRE TRADE RELATIONS.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 April 1939, Page 4

EMPIRE TRADE RELATIONS.

A RATHER uninspiring view of Empire trade appears to be taken by Mr Peter Bennett, who has been re-elected as president of the Federation of British Industries. At the annual meeting of that organisation, according to one of yesterday’s cablegrams, Mr Bennett said it was difficult to reconcile the industrial aspirations of the different members of the Commonwealth, and again that “they might not like New Zealand’s policy, but they realised that the Empire was the world’s greatest trading entity and believed it was to the advantage of each part that mutual trade should be developed, to the utmost.”

There is at least a suggestion here that in ideal conditions the Dominions would have remained, so far as trade in manufactured goods is concerned, a preserve of the British manufacturer and exporter and would have been content to concentrate their own industrial energies on the production of foodstuffs and raw materials. Apart from any detail, question of trade policy that is now open between the Mother Country and the Dominions —disregarding, for example, the fact. that Britain is at present imposing restrictions on her importations of jneat from the countries of the overseas Empire—Mr Bennett s conception of Empire- trade development is open to strong objection and criticism. It is at best a painfully limited and narrow conception and appears to amount in. essence to nothing better than a prejudiced assertion of the immediate interests of the British manufacturer and an attempt to make these interests more important than the welfare of the whole British nation.

The Dominions inevitably, and with every right, are seeking something more than trade development —important though that undoubtedly is. They are seeking national development in the fullest sense of the term and it is clear enough that there is no other basis on which the Empire can continue with advantage to its own people and to those of the rest of the world.

It is certainly desirable that mutual trade between the countries of the Empire should be developed to the utmost, but it must be genuinely mutual trade and not trade carried on in conditions dictated'by a superior partner to subordinate partners. Apart from any underlying questions of constitutional and autonomous rights, it may be perceived very easily that the Empire will attain its full strength as a union of free nations, able to offer a lead to the world, only when the Dominions have developed individually a fully rounded economic life, enabling them to carry and support much larger populations than at present. In any hopeful policy of Empire development, the immediate adjustment of trading relations evidently must be made subservient to that great aim. It is demonstrated, in the action Britain is now taking with regard to meat imports and in other ways, that there are definite limits to the expansion of Empire trade in existing circumstances. In the industrial aspirations which Mr Bennett, declares difficult to reconcile, the Dominions are seeking the only route that is open to an ultimate expansion of trade as well as development. Pursuing the progressive policy demanded of them, in their own interests and in those of Empire development, British manufacturers must accept the facts ol an inevitable and desirable economic evolution in all the Dominions and must adapt their own to that evolution.