Chronic Indigestion
Warning Democracy. By C. H. Douglas. (Grieve. 7s. 6d.) WHILE it is on the heights of a boom that a company promoter 'reaps his golden harvest, it is in the depths of a slump that 'the economic pamphleteer collects his coppers—a fact attested by the shelves of any bookshop. (Indeed, here is another Boom that may soon come to an end through over-stimulation Of production.) This is not to suggest that Major Douglas's Views are a mushroom growth forced to maturity to meet a 's'udden demand, for they have, in fact, been before the public for a number of years ; but, on the contrary, rather to draw 'ttention' to them, lest amid the clamour of a great cloud of Witnesses his testimony might not be heard. For Major Douglas does go straight to the root question : why is it that the solution of the problem of scarcity has brought with it not plenty and content but suffering and want ? The value of jiis teaching lies not so much in his basic thesis—the A plus B theorem, which states that under present credit arrangements purchasing power can never equal prices, for this is con- testable—but in the ideas proceeding-from it, the first of Which is that the face of that monstrous fiction,' the economic Phan, is grey and his body is wasting, not through under- feeding, but because the metabolism of his body is too slow to Assimilate the size and richness of his meals. From this starting-point other ideas follow, such as (1) that most Unemployment is technological and should be looked on not as a-punishment but as a reward ; (2) that the concentration of the world on, wprk rather than on the ability to consume is a moral attitude unjustified by the facts ; (8) that a universal. policy of dumping surplus production on your neighbours is mathematically certain to lead to ruin and ultimately to war and (4) that the final remedy is not that ever-retreating mirage, a change of heart, but some' form of social dividend by which those who are released from work by technical improve:. ment may share in the extra wealth created, rather than starve because of it. With so much of importance to say, it is rather melancholy that Major Douglas should be at such pains to antagonize bankers, who are, after all, the people whose help, is. indispensable. No one without a "Secret Society." mind could write such things as "Ninety-seven per cent. (why not say ninety-nine?). of the finest sites in this country are owned by banks, and the only reason they have not got the other three per cent. is that for the moment they do not want them,"-. or attribute the retention of flogging in the English penal code to the preference of High Finance for hard living. To the impartial observer bankers seem to hold with Doctor Salvator, in Don Juan in America, that " Thought is a symptom of cerebral decay." One suspects that their chief crime against Major Douglas is one of inattention : "Cat animal eat_ bien mechant quand on rattaque it ne as defend pas."
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