Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

NOW I HAVE THEM IN MY POCKET! 429It was actually a Conservative government. The National Labour Partyremained without importance, and Stanley Baldwin became once morethe actual leader. From now on the English currency was a papercurrency, the value of which did not depend on the free play ofexchange, on the basis of gold, but on the will of the government. Thecurrencies of the Scandinavian countries followed the drop in thepound. In February, 1932, the MacDonald government introduced a newtariff, which meant the end of British free trade; for a certain quantity ofhome-grown wheat the English farmer was guaranteed a price of onedollar a bushel. This new policy of the mother country, directed towarda closed economy, drew the whole empire after it; the EmpireConference of Ottawa led in July and August, 1932, to a series ofagreements by which the various parts of the empire granted each otherpreferential tariffs.The conference aimed at making the British world empire reallyBritish. Hitherto England had carried on more trade with other countriesthan with its dominions and colonies. Now this was to cease in themain; in the following years trade between mother country and coloniesassumed first place; a great 'Buy British' campaign was launchedthroughout the empire. Thus a step had been taken toward BritishEmpire autarchy; this autarchy was an answer to the new protectivetariff policy of the United States, but it was also an answer to thecommercial expansion of Japan, which, with the help of her wretchedwages and the misery of her peasants and workers, flooded the worldmarket with articles so cheap as to defy competition. The Ottawadecisions, which, in 1932, were ratified by the British Parliament,affected almost eight per cent of the United States export trade, abouttwenty per cent of the Argentine trade, and approximately sixty per centof the Danish; they strongly affected Russia and Japan, and to a lesserdegree Germany.In the British developments Hitler and Rosenberg believed theydetected the beginning of that spirit 'which is everywhere creating thesame forms, though under different banners.' Hitler could not regardRamsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin as the Aryans and anti-Semites with whom he wanted to ally himself; but in December, 1931,when Alfred Rosenberg went to London and became celebrated as 'oneof the best dressed Germans,' he spoke to English