WORLD AND LOCAL DEPRESSION.
In what follows it must not be supposed that I am for- getting that we are now passing through what may fairly be described as a world depression, amounting almost to a world financial crisis. But it is important to remember that this world depression is an affair of eighteen months or of two years' duration at most, whereas the industrial depression in this country is an affair of years. Indeed, it would be true to say that before 1929 there were many years when world trade on the whole expanded and when the exports of many countries increased. During those years, however, Great Britain no longer obtained her pre-War proportion of this volume of world trade, while her proportion of exports to those of other countries contracted materially.
Nor have I any wish to ignore the fact that the causes both of world depression and of our own depression are numerous and complex. I am not minimising in any degree such factors as the uneven distribution of gold, the hoarding tendencies in France and the United States, nor the effect produced upon many centres, including our own, by Reparation Payments and International War Debt payments, complicated as the latter are by the high productive tariffs of the United States. All these are factors well deserving both recognition and consideration. Nevertheless, I prefer to refer more specifically to those main causes within our own control, attention to which would, I am persuaded, have, in time, a beneficial effect upon the situation here, which, in its turn, would react favourably upon other centres.
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