"Goods Across the Water"

In Manhattan, before the American Iron and Steel Institute, British Ambassador Sir Esme Howard made a speech. He began: "It is a great honor. . . . But, like all honors or privileges--if we except the ancient British Order of the Garter, which Disraeli said he particularly admired because there was no damned merit attached to it--it entails some responsibility." Like U. S. Ambassador Alanson B. Houghton at London, in his recent Pilgrims speech (TIME, May 18), he took for granted all the Anglo-Saxon platitudes, but, "looking about for a substitute, it struck me that, building on these sentiments as an accepted fact, I might take as my text 'goods across the water' as a useful text, since phrases we must have."

He warned the U. S. that "a party that wants to do all the selling and no buying will end by doing no selling at all, because his buyers will be, like the poor oysters of the Walrus and the Carpenter, all gone. The seller, like the Carpenter, will one day make a beautiful speech and wake up to find himself speaking to thin air, because 'oysters there were none'."

The gist of his long speech was that the "United States and the British Empire are today each others' best customers," but that, if the U. S. and other countries did not buy more from Britain, it would be impossible for the latter to continue to buy raw materials in large quantities; that, if Britain could not improve her export trade, it would, despite the best intentions, be impossible for her to continue paying her U. S. War debt. The resultant economic situation, the Ambassador thought, would not be fatal to the U. S., "but it will be unpleasant." From this, he argued that it was in the interests of the prosperity of all peoples to follow "the Christian doctrine of the Golden Rule," which is "when you come down to it, the only true 'real politik' in the philosophy of life and that it is an unquestionable truth that he who seeks to save his life by purely selfish means must end by losing it."