GERMANY FACES THE WINTER
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
Sca,—The threatened food-shortage in Germany during the coming winter provides our Government with an opportunity for a gesture of helpful friendliness new in diplomacy which would do much to reduce the spirit and risk of war. A certain amount of the new money created by the banking system for building warships might be used instead to purchase butter and other commodities to be exported as a gift to the German people. It would be a pleasing, if tardy, amende for our starvation of German children by the blockade we continued after the Armistice, and it would be a great boon to the British. dairying 'industry. The amount of inflation is the same whiehetel *ay the money is used, and if we must create new money to produce something to give to our foreign neighbours it is more conducive to world peace and national safety that our generosity should take the form of butter now -than bombs later. If anyone should object to butter being sent to Germany when our own unemployed are short of butter, the answer is that the purchases' of other goods made by those in the prosperous dairying industry will enable other industries to expand, and their employees in turn to buy more butter. Only in this roundabout way can the need of the unemployed be partly met under a system which adheres to the principles of " sound " finance and treats the purpose of industry as being the production of work rather than the production and utilisation of goods.—
Yours very truly, TAviroex. 128A St. James' Court, S.W.
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