Lead or Gold?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 107, 11 July 1941, Page 4

Lead or Gold?

F we may accept the summary sent to New Zealand by cable, a well-known war correspondent made the outrageous suggestion last week in London that the war in Syria would have ended long ago if Britain had used gold and silver bullets instead of lead. It is true that money-bags have sometimes to be used as make-weights in the desperate crises of war, but to boast about their use in the past, and suggest that we should buy our way through Syria to-day instead of fighting our way through is as insulting to the French as it is to us. It is also monstrous to suggest that Lawrence succeeded in Arabia merely because he went there with "handfuls of gold." We are not yet so decadent that we have to hire ruffians to fight for us against a civilised power. But it is one thing to use gold as an agent of corruption and another thing to use it as a war weapon. A single ounce of gold can be converted into a rifle, into twenty bayonets, or into a thousand loaded cartridges; a hundred ounces would make twenty machine-guns; a thousand ounces a Hurricane fighter. Such conversions are being made every day and every night, and the process will continue without ceasing till the war ends. But we carry the rifles and pilot the ‘planes. We stand up to the bullets and bombs of our enemies. We do not sit in safety at home and barter our gold for someone else’s blood. It pleases Hitler to say that we do, but it is astonishing to find a British war correspondent saying, and a British newspaper allowing him to say, that gold is better armatment than conviction and courage. We must use gold to the utmost, or we shall be defeated. But we shall also be defeated if our chief use of it is to corrupt. It is the most disgusting of all forms of defeatism to suggest that grease on our enemy’s palm will protect us from the bullets in his gun,