Feb. 16.
Worecasts of the Geddes Economy Committee's report anticipated reductions of £200,- 000,000. The actual value of the cuts advocated, according to the telegraphed summary, is only £47,000,000; but allusions to other means of saving, as on the Ministries of Labour, Transport and Overseas Trade, on health insurance and unemployment doles, suggest that the sum of the Committee's recommendations may not fall short at any rate of the £175,000,000 which, it is understood, will be needed to balance the next budget. Opposition, of course, will spring up in all departments. The Adwoiralty, whose criticism the Government appears, not very fairly, to have published simultaneously with the report, begins the denunciation in no measured terms; and all the other departments are to be allowed to issue statements. The fight over education will be particularly keen.
Education to-day,' says the Westminister Gazette," is actually at a lower level than in pre-war days. Hundreds of children who have won their way to a secondary school are unable to find places. The teachers have had wholly inadequate additions to their salaries. Above all, we want more and better education if we are to keep our place as a nation. We shall not get that by starving the schools.'' Labour also is not likely to relinquish what it has managed to get in the way of unemployment doles, etc. without a fierce struggle. The outlook for the Geddes report and therewith for any material lightening of taxation is not bright.
It is probably due to the usual human wish to eat one's cake and have it, or in this instance to cut down taxation without sacrificing the expensive social legislation of the past few years, that the British Cabinet is pressing so strongly for a world economic conference at Genoa. If Europe can only get on its legs again and produce something, it will be able to buy the goods which Britain can turn out. The project is not quite so selfish as it sounds when put like that, but also, unhappily, it is not nearly so simple, because the economic aim cannot be dissevered from political misgivings. France eyes the project with palpable mistrust. Czecho-Slovakia and the Little Entente are uneasy because as the Journal des Débats,"' one of the most thoughtful papers in France, says, they border on Russia and Germany, and they dread the effect of calling those countries to the conference chamber on equal terms with others. This mistrust will be widely shared, especially as regards Russia. The Soviet have already shown the line that they mean to follow at Genoa by preparing a list of damages done by the supposed Allied invasions of Russia as a set-off to claims for payment of the Romanoff debts. Unquestionably the requirements of Russia are enough to keep all the factories of Europe busy for an indefinite time. But is it possible to.devise, under the Soviet regime, any credit system which will enable manufacturers to meet those requirements until Russia begins to produce something to pay for them? There are people who say that sooner or later the Soviet will have to be recognized by foreign Governments and why not sooner? The answer would seem to be that we are yet without satisfactory proof that the Soviet is less radically and simplicity hostile to our political and economic system than it ever was. The wretched fiasco of the Russo-British trade agreement is a lesson in the impossibility of dealing with the Bolshe-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.