Word: sir
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week the three powers stood firm, not only at Shanghai but also at the little International Settlement on the Island of Kulangsu, near Amoy. There the Japanese landed 126 marines. Soon Vice Admiral Sir Percy Noble, Commander-in-Chief of the British China Fleet, served the Japanese with an ultimatum to clear out. Sir Percy was not speaking for Britain alone but for France and, more important, for the U. S. Throughout the war the Japanese have been considerably more respectful to the U. S., which is a big nation with a big fleet more free to prowl...
...Chamberlain's Chancellor of the Exchequer and Inner Cabinet confidant, Sir John Simon, is cold and devious, a lawyer whose poker face and ambiguous, clausy rhetoric are well adapted to muddling through. Devious and poker-faced as ever last week, Sir John took steps definite enough to jolt the bowler-hatted businessmen of London's "City." He mobilized the Bank of England and the London Stock Exchange to impose "Simon's unofficial ban" on British buying of U. S. securities...
...passed, no edict issued. Investors were simply advised that their cash is needed at home to finance rearmament, that the pound sterling must not be weakened by further flight of capital. This step towards totalitarian economics produced no excitement. Sir John simply wished, and British-fashion, business "assented...
...England, traditionally the world's banker, and for Wall Street, now the world's safe deposit box, Sir John Simon's order to investors to "Buy British" recorded another portentous retreat from the free capitalism of Adam Smith. Under it, Britain found that capital export opened markets, expanded prosperity across national boundaries, employed surplus British wealth. Today, British capital is no longer exported in this sense; it flees, and its flight is at this time a drain on national resources...
Germany, Italy and Japan have found a way to stop this drain. But they did so by violating capitalism's unwritten Magna Charta: That money must have a right to go wherever it can make profits and avoid losses. In Britain, this right has now been suspended by Sir John Simon's dictum: "The export of capital . . . would be deleterious to the national interest...