World Dissolution Avoided

World Dissolution Avoided

Once again certain Tories were after the snowy scalp of James Ramsay MacDonald last week. As usual the attack was led by High-Tariff Tories. Backed by the potent Beaverbrook Press, 150 of them huddled together in a secret meeting, then rushed the Cabinet with a demand for a 4d-a-pound tariff on foreign meats (with a tuppenny rebate for the Dominions) to protect the British farmer.

Premier MacDonald's free-trade stomach had rebelled hard enough at the food tariffs resulting from the Ottawa Conference and the inevitable rise in food prices to British consumers. This new upping he would not stomach. Observers announced that if the Conservatives persisted, they might force not only Premier MacDonald but his faithful Liberal President of the Board of Trade, Walter Runciman, out of the Cabinet.

A second effort to protect British agriculture got under way last week with the organization of Empire Farmers' Co-Op., Ltd., an inter-Dominion society to limit production of foodstuffs throughout the British Empire with the announced goal of raising and pegging prices 25% above present levels. Chairman of E. F. Co-Op. is that most composite Empire peer, Trevor Grant of Grant, Baron Strathspey, who was born in New Zealand, is a Baronet of Nova Scotia, lives in Scotland.

Whatever the King's subject accustomed to a ''Free British Meal Table" may think of the new tariff barriers raised by the Ottawa Conference, it seemed last week the best of all possible pacts to Leslie Hore-Belisha, Financial Secretary of the Treasury. Said he: "Failure of the Ottawa Conference would have meant the end of the Empire. . . . Dissolution of the British Empire would have meant dissolution of the world. . . . We have avoided that."

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