WANTED : A LOCARNO OF INDUSTRY [To the Editor of
THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—In the United States we are crudely experimenting with attempts at planned industrial and agricultural develop- ment, whereby we hope to evolve a working compromise between cut-throat individualistic competition and arbitrary regulation.
-These present attempts may or may not succeed, but it is probable that those few nations who still object to auto- cratic rule will have to work out, within themselves, something of that kind, since, under quantity-production and rapid changes of process, the losses due to untrammelled, unplanned competition have proved too colossal. • But does not the same principle apply to international affairs ? There are, it is true, various inconspicuous attempts at international co-ordination in production, as with wheat and rubber and sugar, while most of the world's attention, when not taken up with revolution, is devoted to matters like currency, credits and armament.
Governments are upset when people see no prospect of living under the ones they have. Currency has broken down because unsound industry has broken down. Credit applied to bad business can only make bad business worse, and armaments are accumulated by peoples who fear that somebody is not going to let them live. Yet; even the most impossible' Nazi might become more reasonable if there• were a friendly and earnest conference as to how Germans might live.
Is it unimaginable that, in place of wolfish attempts in one nation and another to 'capture the means of livelihood of whole populations, we shall some time seek an Economic Locarno for the co-ordination of productive industry, in order to plan how our respective nations may help solve each other's problems of livelihood ? Shall we not have to realize some time that there is no real prosperity in the ruin of our neighbour ? Must the bodies that consult on inter- national affairs always be made up largely of those who are out of touch with the basic factors making for peace and war that are found in productive industry as a means of living?
We are destined to find within our respective governmental units that recovery comes from speeding up the natural processes of sound business, by adjusting supply to demand, rather than from upholding and continuing by artificial means those processes that have brought disaster and distress. British experience with rubber, ours with cotton, and Brazil's with coffee, are all cases in point of artificially upholding unsound economic methods to the inevitable breaking point.
The natural process of production and exchange between nations is multilateral, not bi-lateral. Brazil sells coffee to us ; with the proceeds she should buy other goods of England and Germany, in order that they may buy our cotton. Uni-lateral Free Trade by Britain may be abandoned as impossible when it is all on one side, but we must ultimately rediscOver new methods of fairburing these natural 'processes in place of bi-lateral reciprocal arrangements that are fundamentally uneconomic.—I am, Sir, &e.;
60 State Street, Boston, Mass., U.S.A.. • • R. M. BRADLEY.
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