Mr. Runciman on the Income Tax Mr. Runciman, speaking at a Liberal mass meeting at West Hartlepool last month said the people of the district seemed to be taking the ills of today far too quietly. No part of England was at present passing through as severe an ordeal as the northeast coast.
Why should they take it without an effort to get over it? Why should they accept these evils without making an effort to cure them? These evils had been exaggerated and made more intense by bad government. If any income-tax payer thinks he is going to see his income-tax brought down below 6s. in the £, merely because of a promise made by our statesmen that Germany was to pay, he is living in a fool's paradise, The indemnity is not going to reduce the income-tax.
"The German indemnity: was up the spout," and it was going te take a very clever fellow to get it down. (Laughter.) If they tried to levy the indemnity beyond a certain point it would not be the Germans who would pay, but we who would pay. What gave the shipping industry the knock-out blow? It was the payment of the German indemnity m ships. Before the war Germany bought more from us than all the self-governing Dominions put together, and until Germany could start to buy again they on the northeast coast were. going to have bad trade.
If Germany was going to buy goods from us she must pay us by selling goods back to us. Yet they had taken steps in the House of Commons and in their departments to prevent Germany sending us goods. be", said Miss Myrtle Schroeder and George Dower, heads of the two largest phonograph record selling agencies here. Dealers in sheet music agreed with them.
"There is a tendency back toward the old ballad songs we heard 15 years ago but these will never be the same sad, sweet things they were in those days," added Miss Schroeder. "There will be more brightness and life. I believe that a new and distinctive type of American music will result."
Mr. Dower agreed in this, adding that even to-day, many of the po pular American songs are being translated into the language of France where American music made a hit during the war. 7 General demand for classical music is finding expression in the interweaving of masterpieces with the present day dance music, they said. The Spring Song, Rubenstein's Melody in F, and the melody ies of Rimsky-Korsakoff (in the Song of India, for instance) are thus finding popular audiences. Negro and Oriental music are also mainiaiving their influence. These, fused in the crucible of the dance hall are to produce the American music—a bright and new tye of song.—Reuter.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.