GREAT BRITAIN: The Public Purse

In the great Egyptian Hall of London’s Mansion House last week deft waiters in knee breeches had removed most of the elaborate silver service and distributed the nuts and raisins. The King’s Health had been drunk, gentlemen were free to smoke. The occasion was the annual dinner of the retiring Lord Mayor to the merchants and bankers of London. Bull-voiced, the Lord Mayor cried:

“Pray silence, milords and gentlemen. . . . I give you the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prosperity to the Public Purse.”

Neville Chamberlain, buttoned into the gold-laced uniform of a privy councilor, rose up before a decoration-studded audience which knew that the pound had just performed a spectacular swoop on ‘change and that the unrepentant Labor Party was about to try to put England into 100% Socialism. But, unlike any other of the world’s chief Finance Ministers, Mr. Chamberlain had the facts of prosperity on his side. Said he:

“For many months the voices of critics have been hushed almost to silence. Perhaps the explanation may be found in the fact that the critics’ favorite instrument of chastisement, a comparison between the wretched conditions prevailing here and the glowing prosperity elsewhere, has not been very easy to discover. . . .

“It is certainly satisfactory to observe that in nearly all cases the indices of production show a marked advance as compared with last year. Take the second quarter of the year. I find that in the case of textiles, not generally considered one of our most prosperous industries, the index for the year is 91 against 86 last year. For chemicals it is 109 against 101. For engineering and shipbuilding it is 119 against 97; iron and steel 104 against 78. . . . Shipbuilding under construction has doubled and at the same time the volume of shipping laid up has been halved.

“I say that this is an encouraging picture, but there is one qualification. The improvement really is mainly the measure of our advance in self-sufficiency, for it is chiefly the result of an improvement in home trade. It is true that during the first eight months of this year British exports exceeded those of last year by a little over £20,000.000. But the difficulties of international trade seem rather to be increasing than diminishing. . . .

“I think it is desirable not to attach too much importance to the maintenance of sterling at a particular level. I have in this matter declared the policy of His Majesty’s Government many times without succeeding always in convincing people across the sea. However, I’ll try once more and say for the umpteenth time that the policy of this government is to maintain the independence of sterling. . . . We have never attempted nor are we attempting now to fix exchange at a given point or maintain it even within a fixed limit of values.”