Editor ut "The Beonomia Some people who ought to know, tell us that we ure doing ourselves serious harm abroad, by continual explaining, through the mouths of pessimists' to whom no one Yistens here, that our days as a great industrial nation are number= ed. Foreigners, we are told, and even our American cousins' who! ought to understand our little ways better, are beginning to believe that there must be something in it; ro perhaps it ix time that a word or two was said on the other side.
Anyone who is at all well on in years can remember how all this pessimistic talk is an echo of what he heard 50 years ago. I had an uncle who was never tired of telling me, in the eighties of last century, thet the sun of British me dustry was set, that the workmen would not work as they used to do, that the masters had lost the ort of mai dustry and of, Ming go they had sueceeded in making them and that' T should live to see the grass growing in the strocts of Manchester and Liverpool. Then we had Mr. Joseph Chamberlain's great eam= Paign in the early years of this century when Britain's "dying me dustries" became a stock phrase in cur polities and now a number of young economists, who think have made a mistake in going back to the gold standard, are singing the same old dirge over the corpse of British trade—that sturdy old corpse which comes to life with a Kick every time that it ig laid out for decent burial,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.