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For India spoke a close friend of Mahatma Gandhi but by no means his representative, Mr. S. R. Bomanji, representative in London of the Indian Chamber of Commerce. "The silver conference will be called," said India's Bomanji bitterly, "but my country's delegates will not be heard. Such a conference was held at Geneva but when we wished to appear, the British chairman of the British delegation said to us, 'I am chairman and I shall name those who will speak.' We were not heard."
Soul of Andrew Mellon. Painfully conscious that people call him a "Capitalist," wincing at the term, U. S. Secretary of the Treasury Mellon, after giving the Congress to understand that further Debt concessions to Europe are not to be considered, bared his fiscal soul thus:
"Capitalism or whatever name may be applied to the system which has been evolved in adapting individual initiative to the machine age has defects, of course, and may be, as has been suggested, still in its infancy, but there is no disputing the fact that it has produced an abundance of food and clothing. . . .
"Defects in the present system we shall overcome by degrees ... so that we shall not always have the painful spectacle of men willing to work but unable to find a market for the only commodity which they can exchange for food and clothing which they need and which the world can produce in such abundance."
Thus the Secretary of the Treasury made coldly a point which red-hot Communists consider one of their best; namely that Capitalism in its present form tends to create a periodic surplus of good things, yet leaves the worker destitute at such periods amid the abundance he has helped create. Mr. Mellon, perhaps not caring that Moscow would gloat over his words, made abrupt transition to his concluding statement that "the standard of living which obtains in this country . . . must be maintained at all costs. . . . In fact the ultimate solution of the world's difficulties would seem to lie in the possibility of building up a higher standard."
Points by Bigwigs, "We cannot conceive the saint, the hero, the poet or the artist seated before the calculating machine," complained Italy's Alberto Pirelli, one of her three richest men. "The outer life is killing the inner. . . . Vulcan has killed Apollo!"
"Nothing could be further from the fact," boomed Dennis F. Kelly, incorporator of Chicago's coming World's Fair (1933)> "than the viewpoint of many Americans as to the origin of the modern department store, who erroneously consider it to be an American institution born and bred." As president of the National Retail Dry Goods Association, Mr. Kelly handsomely declared that "The Bon Marche in Paris, established in 1852, was the first general store to be operated along departmentalized lines."
Of U. S. automobiles Britain's Dr. William H. Coates. famed economist, said: "When efficiency is very high, exports are natural. . . . The rest of the world wants to benefit by that efficiency. It wants American cars; they are good. But we shall shut them out if you will not take the products of our efficiency, whatever be their nationality."