Parliament adjourned this week, much to everybody's relief, for there were symptoms of general tiredness. It is, though, difficult to see how Ministers will get far from London, with the utter economic chaos in Europe, with Germany prospering commercially, beyond imagination, yet with 3,000 marks to £1, with the Free State troops carrying on a_ species of warfare which, apart from the extreme South, where there may be a battle round Cork, is degenerating into guerilla operations, and with everybody grumbling about taxes and similar burdens of every sort. Still, I gather that the Chancellor is getting his money in satisfactorily and, as I have always said, there is very little distress, since the scale of relief is still generous and some Municipalities pay their employees at absurdly high rates. Of course, in this respect Poplar leads the way, with a minimum of £4 for unskilled labour, a rate which makes the agricultural labourer, who gets 36s. a week, and the miner, who is not making much more than £2 to £2/10, very annoy-{ed_indeed.
Still, the total of unemployed is falling—it is about 400,000 less than in January, and with luck by the end of the year we may just be under 1,000,000 out of work, Fortunately, the cost of living has dropped again; vegetables and fruit are extraordinarily plentiful and cheap, and eggs, after rising in price, have, through their numbers, produced a real—slump. Accordingly, the cost of living jought to fall well below 80 per cent. by the autumn, though it may go up again a little in the winter. On the whole, we might be doing very much worse than we are, and if half the grumbling were justified, it is difficult to conceive why we are not.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.