ELIMINATING THE DRONE
Sta,—In Janus's Notebook, published in the Daily Mail on February 27th, which has just reached me, he says, "The statement that an extra ton of steel per man a year would buy our whole sugar imoort requirements ought to be an effective stimulus to every patriotic steel-worker" and that, since steel-workers do not usually read White Papers, "imaginative" speakers ought to " plug " these lessons on the wireless. May I ak what the quoted statement ought to do to every patriotic bookmaker, adver- tising tout, motor-car salesman, and to all the young, strong barrigters, dance-band players, footmen? My question may seem frivolous or embittered or irrelevant, but I am sure that this endless exhortation to essential workers is an insult to their intelligence. If producing coal, steel, electricity, gas and food-crops is not merely of the first importance, but of crucial, desperate, survival importance, as we all now realise it to be, surely we must revolutionise our attitude to those industries and those engaged in them.
You say, "The individual for the next twelve months must be thinking first of output and only second of wage increases or dividends." Try saying it to yourself when you next visit Craft's or Kempton Park or Littlewoods or the Stock Exchange, and I think you will feel its inadequacy quite keenly. What we must do is show the collier, the farm-labourer, the stevedore, the foundryman, the engine-driver that we recognise, at last, that he is a most important person ; show that we realise, at last, that we cannot allow parasites to fatten on our national body economic at the same time as we make panic appeals to him to redouble his exertions. To do this we should have to shower privileges upon the man who pro- duces and discriminate harshly against the non-essential. The Government and the nation shirk this solution and prefer, like you, to plead with the hardest workers in the land to work still harder. Mr. Thorneycroft in the House of Commons is reported as suggesting a low priority for "nylon stockings for miners' wives." Unless he meant even miners' wives his remark is bound to jeopardise the success of that plea.—Yours faithfully,
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