News of the Week
TITHE repeated warnings of the Chancellor of the -a- Exchequer on the need for further economies must be taken seriously. Further economy may be the only alternative to further taxation. But economies in the past twelve months have been carried to very near the utmost limit compatible with the maintenance of stan- dards of life which the country ought not to be condemned to abandon. Economies, moreover, at this stage arc a tragic confession of impotence. The root of the evil here, as in every country, is the progressive curtailment of international trade. Only on Tuesday France announced a further reduction of her imports of foreign coal from '70 per cent. to 60 per cent. of the 1928-30 average figure, and the defaults of Austria, Greece and other States are due simply to the import barriers of one kind and another that make the sale of their goods abroad *possible.. Committee after committee has considered their situation. A new one was appointed at Geneva on Tuesday. Yet everyone knows the outlook is hopeless— so hopeless that fresh economies can be no more than a temporary stopgap—unless the barriers can somehow be lowered. The new tariffs in this country were to enable ,us to bargain for the lowering of tariffs elsewhere, but the
possibility, which is considerable, of creating a group of low-tariff, say 10 per cent., countries can apparently not begin to materialize till after Ottawa. If so it is a sombre
prospect. * * * *
