A BANKER ON INDUSTRY.
In the Inaugural Address of Mr. R. Holland Martin, delivered before the Institute of Bankers last week, some striking comments were made upon the present industrial situation. Above all Mr. Holland Martin condemned the setting up of a wrong sense of values in the country, maintaining—and, of course, rightly—that we came out of the War poorer and not richer, although we had acted too frequently as though the very reverse were the case. We had, he said, " allowed comfort and safety to become the two main objects of life ; wherefore we have raised the standards of living, not indeed beyond what could be wished for, but beyond our present power to maintain." Mr. Holland Martin said that wealth could not be redistributed by taxation, for taxation could not but hit both good and bad alike, and if a Government were not careful it would find that the decreasing recompense left to the merchant and manufacturer was not sufficient to compensate for the additional work and risk involved in attempting to extend the business.
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