Mr. George's Speech

Austen Chamberlain came home from Geneva. Stanley Baldwin was just home from Aix-les-Bains. But it is doubtful whether either took comfort in his homecoming. For a storm seemed brewing. Unemployment, a coal subsidy, industry running down hill--and then that query from George B. Hunter, the shipbuilder, that query echoed by half a dozen of the country's industrialists: "Are we on the road to ruin?" The question put directly in a public letter to Mr. Baldwin.

There was a second sign of the weather brewing. In Exeter, at Killerton Park, there was rain pouring out of the sky, but special trains, omnibuses, wagons, automobiles, drove straight to the spot. Under the flooding, 30,000 people stood for an hour and a half, stood while their umbrellas leaked and the pure water from Heaven dripped down the backs of their necks--stood and listened to a wizard whose wizardy, like all magic of slight and faery lore, was supposed long since to have vanished. What did he say?

Peace has its disasters as well as war. Britain is like an old-established firm of high repute which finds itself, for one reason or another in straits. It has lost a substantial part of its business. With difficulty it makes both ends meet, but it keeps 10% of its employes hanging about the premises doing nothing but drawing pay. The directors resort to temporary shifts which only postpone the crash.

If we had as many men employed on the soil in Great Britain, in proportion to the size of the two countries, as they have in Denmark, there would now be 750,000 more workers on the British land than are engaged at this hour. If you take Germany as a basis, there would be 1,000,000 more; if Holland then 1,750,000 more, and if Belgium 2,000,000 more-- that is, if we had devoted the same care to the possibilities of the soil, as they have done in these countries, there would be no unemployment problem of any magnitude to disturb and threaten our national life. It is right that each man should ask himself, landlord, farmer, and laborer, is this scheme just and fair to me?

Then the wizard recited a magic formula: Let the Government guarantee landlords the same income on their lands that they now get, then let it give a cultivating tenure to farmers, supply them with liberal credit, better buildings, and exact of them scientific agriculture.

"The time has come," the wizard said, "when the State should resume legal authority over the land."

Mr. Baldwin may have smiled to himself at the speech when he read it in the newspapers, but when he read "30,000 people . . . an hour and a half . . . pouring rain," doubtless he was not comforted in his homecoming. Mayhap he even cursed the little Welshman.

And Lloyd George as he read the comment on his speech, "to be taken seriously," "a new, vitalizing and challenging idea," perhaps he dreamed a little of homing, coming to the Government bench in the House--until his eye ran on "obsolete policy." "raises the spectre of agrarian strife," "a mere bundle of details."