A POLITICIAN IN A DIFFICULTY
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Sm.,—Throughout the whole animal kingdom there is no more dangerous impulse than that which is known as mass suggestion. It carries nations into war or revolution and it may stampede a mob of horses over a cliff. Old South Africans still remember the cattle killing mania of the Transkeian ICaffirs, and the Russian developments have shown how a whole nation may be reduced to poverty and want by the mass suggestion of a false theory.
It is. a danger to which we are specially exposed in England at the present time. The War, as all wars do, involyed,.a suspension of our, moral and economic standards and left us with an undercurrent of belief in might as right and in the power of numbers. There was and is a tendency. to dethrone reason and experience in favour of impulse and mass suggestion. Nothing could be more disastrous for any nation, and I appeal to our leaders to be guided by the teaching of history and experience and the facts of economies, regardless of the impulses of mass suggestion.
Mr. Hamilton Fyfe feels that we are going to have in this country Protection in some form or other, so he frankly accepts the influence of mass suggestion and proposes as a compromise an Empire Purchasing Board, an unnatural hybrid apparently born of a marriage of Sir Oswald Mosley and Lord Beaverbrook. May! appeal to him not to surrender his reason. to the powers of numbers or the authority of the eminent parents of his hybrid ? The Purchasing Board was tried during the War. It paid extravagant prices and in some cases overstocked its_ market. It could only exist by the power of prohibiting - competitive importations. Russia shows us the most complete example of an Empire Purchasing Board to be found in the world to-day, and people in ,Moscow stand in long lines for hours hoping to 'purchase at high prices articles of food or other necessaries which have been sold out.
Surely the evidence of experience and Our reason revolt against any proposal to imitate this form of bureaucratic autocracy, and we can refuse to surrender the gift of reasoning to the influences, however great, of mass telepathy.
, Matthew Arnold taught us that the world is saved by • .
minorities, by the men who refuse to surrender their reason to the clamour of the mob. Let me appeal to e'cOnomists to be true to themselves. The teaching of economists is not based on phrases such as Empire Free Trade, Safeguarding or Mass Purchases, but on the hard facts of statistics, and the teaching of a bitter experience. Economic laws and the rules of arithmetic cannot be altered by popular clamour, and the best service that any man can render to his country is to proclaim their truth and power, regardless of the strength of the forces against him and confident that the tide must
turn.—I am, Sir, &c., GRAHAM BOWER. Studwell Lodge, Droxford, If ants.
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