To the Editor of the "Norta-Cuina Dairy News."
Sin,—Before the meeting of the Chamber of Commerce took place I was asked time. and time again by people who were very keenly interested what I thought the meeting would be likely to decide to do, and the gist of my reply in every case was "Nothing: you must be prepared to face the situation as well as you can yourself without any outside help. The result of the meeting was exactly as most people must have anticipated, and any further mectings must have exactly the same result, What action will have to be taken must be by the firms themselves direct with their suppliers: concerted action cannot have any effect whatever except to cause unnecessary' friction between the Chambers of Commerce here and in Manchester, If we here are going to present a united front, then the Manchester Chamber will do the same thing, and we shall never get anywhere. What will have to be done will be to go into the details of every transaction separately with the suppliers: how we can pool the lot and ask for a wholesale cancellation goodness only knows. It appears to mo to be a very unbusinesslike suggestion.
All that the Chamber of Commerce can do, in my opinion, is to bring it to the notice of Lancashire that, owing to the drop in exchange, a number of importers, who would have made big profits if everything had gone well, have been disappointed, that they are now in a hole, and to ask what the manufacturers can do.to help them out of it. This is reasonable. On the other hand any sign of force would be resented on the other side, and here would be taken as a precedent for some future occasion.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.