I do not pretend to be an expert either in the matter of currency or credit, nor do I propose to draw on the glibness with which people, equally inexpert, can expound their views, knowing that what they say can have practically no influence on life, generally, and that the limitations of life cannot be removed by external or mechanical devices. Senator Baxter, for instance, was very eloquent about the fact that when you want grain or other products of the land multiplied it can only be done by providing capital—which is the savings of other people. I would suggest that if food production is going to be increased by making available the accumulated savings which belong to individuals, then those individuals should have a part-ownership in all that is produced. Now, that is a thing that must be recognised immediately. Secondly, if it is proposed that the accumulated savings of A, B and C are going, under the authority and sanction of Government, to be directed, under the decision of this bank or other banks, and not by the decision of the individual owners, to the providing of capital for the farmer in the interest of the general good—that interest to be adjudged by the State—that might be one thing, but if the Government says, in effect: "Your labour and your land must be devoted to what we determine, and if there is any loss, you must suffer it," I do not think the farmers would jump at the idea. I have noted that when the Government says, for instance, to the farmers: "Your labour must be devoted to the growing of wheat," the Government step in and make some provision for its achievement. Consequently, if a worker saves £100 and puts it into the bank, and if the Government then says that that £100 must be made available for the farmers, then that worker is a part owner of what is produced on that land. Consequently, if the farmer fails, either through his own ineptitude or through a bad season—or whatever might be the cause—then the Government must see that the loss on that farm will be provided for, or, alternatively, when the Government operates in the same way in regard to labour, then the loss which may incidentally occur from that action must be borne by the farmer, and he has no more complaint than the man who saves £100 or £1,000 and sees it being used for the purpose of the farmer.
In connection with the original clause, I may say that I do not exactly accept what the Archbishop of Canterbury says with regard to the control of credit. The Archbishop says, in effect, that money, or the credit which does duty for money, has become in effect a monopoly—which I do not accept— and then he goes on to say, in effect, that all monopolies are necessarily taken over by the State, or should be taken over by the State. Then, from that statement, which is obviously incomplete, and therefore cannot be exactly true, he draws a conclusion, to the effect that the banks should be limited in lending power to the amount deposited by their clients, while the issue of new credit should be the function of a public authority. That is the opinion of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but I can still claim to be a theoretical Christian, even if I disagree about the banks.
Now, in the winding-up part of the original clause, it says "that the bank shall have the general function and duties of taking such steps as the board may from time to time deem appropriate and advisable towards safeguarding the integrity of the currency and ensuring that, in what pertains to the control of credit, the constant and predominant aim shall be the welfare of the people as a whole." Now, of course, if the Government is setting up this institution, it is quite clear that it must be directed towards the welfare of the people as a whole, and therefore I suggest that it is only a kind of pious aspiration that is put in here. The board is to provide for the common good, but the final arbiter as to whether or not that fits into its perfect niche is necessarily a matter for Government decision as to whether it does provide for the common good or not. When we come to the amendments, Nos. 4 and 5, the first amendment— the Labour amendment—speaks about "the safeguarding of the integrity of the currency and ensuring that currency and credit shall be issued in correct equation to the economic needs of maximum production and full employment."
Supposing that, actually, the integrity of the currency was divergent from maximum production and full employment, how is the Minister going to act, if this is put in? According to this proposal, the Minister is ordered to act with two aims in view, namely, the integrity of the currency and maximum employment, but supposing there is a divergency there? There might easily be such a divergency. One Labour Senator gave us a somewhat incomplete picture of the condition of France in 1936 or 1937—or rather, he was quoting from what a Deputy then said about the condition of France. What was the position in France then? At an earlier stage, the French people had been hardworking and thrifty. They were thrifty to almost an exaggerated extent, but in or about that time, by an arbitrary act of their Government, for every franc that they had, they were robbed of four-fifths of it. In other words, the ordinary French person was robbed of 8d. and was allowed to retain 2d., and that was only by virtue of the fact that their Government had that enormous power. The Fianna Fáil Minister then went on to point out a wonderful picture with regard to the abnormal production in France, but it must be remembered that the owners of every franc had been robbed of 8d. by the Government and were left only 2d. out of every franc. What is happening here is that the maximum production, as suggested by a Fianna Fáil Minister in 1926, is only to be achieved by robbing the people—by taking four-fifths of the money earned by the people.
Now, when we come to the other amendment, in Senator Baxter's name, which says "that currency and credit shall be issued in such volume as will meet the demands of full production and employment thereby securing that the constant and predominant aim shall be the welfare of the people as a whole," it seems to me to be merely an attempt to get enshrined in a Bill a fallacious doctrine by people whose ineptitude on this subject is only equalled by their enormous verbosity and glibness.
We are going to affirm here in an Act that the meeting of the demands of full production and employment automatically, of necessity, secures the welfare of the people as a whole. At the present moment in certain countries of the world this full production and maximum employment is achieved. It is enormously achieved. I have had a certain close observation of it. There is at least one country in the world where a criminal employee who has more money than he can spend knows, when he does not care to turn up, that his employer cannot do anything about it because, if he speaks a cross word to him, he has only to tell him to go somewhere, and there are 100 other employers ready to welcome him with open arms and, possibly, to give him a higher wage. You have maximum employment and production. In this instance, they have been produced by a condition of total war. I wonder if there is that automatic and necessary relationship and fullness of relationship between full production and employment and the welfare of a people as a whole. One may say that whoever was the party— I will not say guilty—but worthy of having produced this condition of total war, has, by the definition in this proposed amendment, secured the welfare of the people as a whole.
I do wish people would always say "I believe" or "I affirm" rather than say "A great many people believe." On the one hand, if the thing is blown skyhigh he can always say: "I only said a great many people believe," and if it is not blown skyhigh, he has put that forward as an argument. People talk about how extraordinary it is that this thing can be done for a war. The peculiar thing about war is that we always necessarily regard it as an abnormal condition, and eminently so in what is now, representing a tendency rather than a fact, called total war. Nobody can tell you how long this war is going to last, but everybody knows that it is necessarily temporary. If you think of this war going on exactly as it is for X years, or XY years or X to the power of "n" years, you know perfectly well it cannot happen. What has happened, as has been already pointed out, is that at the moment a government, in case of war justified as it is not in other cases, when the whole life of that society is threatened, does take possession of people's savings which really belong primarily to the people; and the government, at the end of the war, should use all its power to pay back what it has taken. It is spending the savings of the present generation and of previous generations.
Now, if all during the 19th century, this money or wealth, as it is called— it is really a combination of what nature produces plus the application of human labour to it—had been immediately consumed instead of being conserved, would the position be just as it is now? Would this small peninsula attached to the Continent of Asia, that we call Europe, be maintaining the enormous number of millions of people that it does? Would, during that time, the Continents of North and South America, the Continent of Australasia, and the Continent of Africa have been exploited as they have been? If that had happened, would it merely mean that things would be just as they are now? Was the fact that that money was not expended in warfare at that time no positive good? It was a positive good and now we are told, inasmuch as the money can be spent that way, therefore, it can be spent the other way, and no harm done. What I want to say is, that, if during the 19th century, the money had been spent that way, you might not have been aware of the evil that was done. Now, when it was not spent that way, and you can see the position of the world as it is to-day, evil as you may think it, you can say, I think, reasonably, that if that money had been spent at that time, Europe would not now support its population; the Continents of America, of Africa, of large sections of Asia and of the rest of the world would not have been exploited and made to support the multitudes of people in the conditions in which they do support them now.
Therefore, when you say: "You can spend so many millions a day on war, why not spend it on the other thing?" well, we are doing evil by spending it on the war—we are injuring the peoples of to-day and, still more, the peoples of to-morrow. Consequently, the judgment you have to make is whether by spending these masses of millions on the social services and all the things you want to do, while doing an obvious good, are you not possibly preventing another and possibly a greater good by that expenditure?
I remember that just before the last war, in remote villages in France, when you went into a little pub or something like that, and you had a gold piece of Holland, of Belgium, of Italy, of England, of Switzerland, you tendered it across the counter; the bar tender came round and looked at a calendar from which he saw exactly the value of the gold in France, and he gave you the change as it was, and he did not stipulate that he must be paid in the currency of his own country. It was gold, and it was a universal currency. The result was that, even when you used a bank note, it carried with it a guarantee that at any time you took it to the bank you could demand its value in gold. What was the Government's function in regard to gold?