The Insidious Subsidy International payments must be made in gold,
goods or services. That truism has been driven into the mind of every newspaper-reader at least once a week for the past six months. Of the services this country is accustomed to pay with the most important is shipping. We carry other countries' citizens and other countries' goods and so help to pay what we owe or the cost of what we buy. That serves to measure the significance of the statement made by Sir Alan Anderson at the Orient Steam Navigation meeting on Tuesday that in the past twelve years the United States Government has paid no less than 1600,000,000 at par in subsidies to American vessels which to a large extent-compete with unsubsidised British ships. Other governments are doing- the same thing on a smaller scale, but the action of America, in spending a sum actually larger than the whole of her war- debt- receipts from this country to date on an expedient which makes debt payments increasingly impossible, stands in a category of its own. It is, of course, inspired . by no conscious malignity. It is merely one more . example of a short-sighted nationalism defeating itself, and a cut-throat competition that beggars everyone.
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