FLOUTING ECONOMIC LAWS.
(To nu Eorroa or nts '• Spec-rAros.".1
Silt,—Nolling could be more timely than your article, "Plain Words on the Industrial Crisis." You say—and I believe that this lies at the root of all our troubles—" We have been pre- tending that it is possible to pay higher wages than the economic conditions will allow." Whatever the advantage of the art of camouflage in warfare, in economies it is curiously fatal. It almost seems sometimes that, since 1914, our statesmen have been mainly engaged in a desperate attempt to burke the unpalatable truths that, if you have losses, you must Meet them; if you have debts, you must pay them; and if you spend money to-day, you cannot expect to have it to spend to-morrow. The worst pretence of all has been that the laws a political economy can be prevented from working, and the next, that to retu.se to accept certain fundamental scientific principles argues an intellectual power above the average. In all other sciences there is a body of received and attested experience, the acceptation of which is an essential condition of future pro- gress. In economics alone, for some mysterious reason, the crude and superficial view claims to be regarded as advanced and progressive. Our intelligentsia impatiently turn aside from the recorded and ordered progress of our long commercial and industrial prosperity, and present to us, as the last word of the new economic vision, the notions that deluded and ruined the gaping audiences of John Ball and Wat Tyler in the Middle Ages. Mr. G. H. D. Cole, in his Self-Government and Industry, says: "To do good work for a capitalist employer is merely, if we view the situation rationally, to help a thief to steal more successfully." I find it difficult, within
the limits of temperate language, adequately" to express my opinion of this kind of teaching, but it might be a pleasing subject of speculation whether the more striking feature of these words is their demagogic vulgarity or their economic ineptitude.
At any rate, since the war our politicians determined that political economy should be side-tracked. But they have. not reaped, and never will reap, one particle of popular gratitude for all their frantic.eforts to sweep back the Atlantic rollers of economic forces with the Partington mop of bureaucratic regulations. The worst of it is that our traditional system of free competition was eminently defensible, and that the present Government was returned by the electorate to defend it. They never made a more ghastly mistake—as many of their followers recognized—than when they yielded to the clamour of the party defeated at the polls for Socialistic legislation. Even the Prime Minister, who did so much at one time by his impulsive philanthropy and meretriciously glittering phrases to inculcate false hopes and so cause bitter disappointment, has lately begun to apprehend this truth. In his recent speeches he has put the case for economic sanity with all the cogency and power for which he is so justly famous. But he learns his lessons all too late. It was, for instance, enly after the long continuance of the Excess Profits Tax had seriously depleted the fund of national capital that he discovered that the profit- earning instinct has its essential function in the industrial state. Each step in his economic education costs this unfor- tunate country millions. He has indeed one salient charac- teristic. He never seems thoroughly to understand the importance of a position till he has abandoned it, or the value of a pass till he has sold it. It is maddening for his followers to hear the arguments which should have been used to prevent the introduction of a measure skilfully employed to demon- strate the evils that have resulted from its passage. He too often leaves with us only the regretful conviction that, when our industrial and commercial prosperity shall have passed away, he will at length have fully mastered the principles on which it might have been, but was not, defended..—I am, Sir,
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