No financial review in the U. S. would have dared to close the year 1929 with a full-page cartoon showing the gigantic "Bears" of business depression advancing down a street of impressive financial buildings, while ahead of them with fear-blanched faces flee four men representing Germany, Great Britain, the U. S., and France.
It would not have been American to give this depressing cartoon the caption GET OUT OR GO UNDER: Bruin on the Bourse. But it was very British to do so, and very like the respected Manchester Guardian Commercial to come paddling serenely along with its Commercial Annual Review 1929, long after most citizens of the U. S. had been glad to forget there ever was such a year.
Boldly displayed without an accompanying article of any kind was a map of England and Wales—such a map as no living man could make of the U. S., for the necessary information does not exist. Entitled lugubriously WHERE THE SHADOW FALLS: Unemployment At A Glance, the map shows from official statistics of the Ramsay MacDonald Labor Government exactly the percentage of unemployment in each and every British county, not forgetting "Salop" the concise if nonsensical abbreviation for "Shropshire."
"All modern humanity," cheerfully begins The Commercial's leading article, "except for short periods the Americans, seems to be afflicted with economic pessimism. . . ."
Of its own district The Commercial headlines MANCHESTER FOLLOWS THE CROWD: Northern Industrials Fall With The Rest.
But despite all this the review, once it strikes its stride, brims with compactly presented, arresting news:
Coal Picks Up. In almost optimistic vein it is admitted that the British coal trade, hardest hit by the British General Strike and Coal Strike of 1926, and very nearly prostrate for years afterward, is now at last "convalescent."
"All the regular markets for British coal, except Spain, have this year taken larger supplies. . . . There is every reason to hope that the last quarter's figures will show a small profit for the whole year. . . . But very large mining areas are still working at a loss, while the profit for the whole country has been small." Though one would never suspect it by looking at the funereal unemployment map, some 50,000 more British miners have work now than during the same period a year ago, but some 150,000 miners remain jobless.
Cut-throat Shippers. "The annual increase in trade throughout the world" sighs The Commercial "appears to be . . . so very small as not even to be keeping up with normal progress in other directions."
How then explain the paradox that, with little or no increase in the volume of business they can collectively expect to get, all the great maritime freight carriers are building newer, faster ships? Explanation: each is girding to fight with newer, more efficient weapons for a larger individual share of the bone which is admittedly not big enough to nourish all.