The Four-Year Plan Reports from Berlin have recently described with
increasing -emphasis the economic difficulties which attend the Four-Year Plan with whose execution General Goering is charged. The plan, which is to make Germany Self-sufficient in certain essential commodities, such as petrol, rubber and staple fibre, may be regarded as an economic counterpart to the prodigious and as yet uncompleted rearmament programme which is to make Germany politically self-sufficient. The cost of the two programmes, so far as it is not borne by credit inflation, is thrown both on the Working-class consumer and on the employer. In the next few months the consumer must face serious deficiencies in the supply of vital foods, such as butter, meat, and perhaps bread, and equally a deterioration in the quality of such foods as are available. On the other hand, the employer, whose profits are limited to 6 per cent., is called on, now that surplus profits are available, to supply capital to finance the Government's policies ; this control of profits and capital gives an opportunity for the " socialisation "• of German industry for which the extreme Nazis hope, and that tendency is certain . to be accentuated by the progress of the plan. In these circumstances social and even political discontent and dissension are inevitable. It will not prevent the Government from achieving its purpose; but the cost of that purposeeannot be concealed.
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