OUR POST-WAR POSITION
Sut,—In your comments upon " General Smuts' Reflections " on December loth you ignore, no doubt for good reasons, one of the most striking things he said, viz., that, after this war, Great Britain will be a poor country. As Mr. Lionel Curtis rightly points out, there is a singular reluctance both in Parliament and in the Press to consider whether our existing post-was commitments are likely to be balanced by incoming revenue during the years following the next Armistice Day.
The late Chancellor of the Exchequer very wisely and courageously refused to commit himself to legislation with regard to post-war schemes until he was in a position to know what would be the resources at his disposal. Will his successor dare to imitate his example? The pressure from so many quarters now being put on him to throw prudence to the winds makes one feel that General Smuts was absolutely right and that others know this too who have realised that it is a case of now or never. A curious and absurd economic fallacy seems to have been gaining ground of late that, after the war, this country can be a self-contained unit, growing its own food and manufacturing all that is needed for its own reqUirements. Conceivably this could be so in the case of countries like the U.S.A. or Russia, which have considerable undeveloped natural resources, but most certainly not with a poor country such as General Smuts envisages with hardly any of these resources except, maybe, some coal. What so few seem yet to realise is that we have lost our foreign investments and the virtual monopoly we enjoyed in the ocean carrying trade ; also, that, not only is the internal debt to our own people of colossal dimensions, but we have also other heavy obligations abroad, some of which we know of and others which. will no doubt be revealed to us in due time. Quem deus perdere vult prius dementat. Let us know how we stand before we create greater insecurity and wake up one fine morning to find that we have been more " planned against than planning."
Meanwhile it may not be amiss to note that, on the other side of the Atlantic, public opinion is veering over rapidly to a conservative point of view and to reliance on private enterprise rather than on State Control. The defeat of the New Deal policy next November is almost a certainty and, magnificent as Roosevelt's services to his country have been during this war, it is extremely doubtful whether he will be chosen for a fourth term of office even if he should so desire it. All this seems to indicate that the Yankees are not going to be pushed down the slippery slopes of socialism to anarchy and bankruptcy whatever we may decide upon in this
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