here today to
advocate, and to press upon our fellow-countrymen--to diminish our
expenditure and to increase our savings.

If you save more you can lend the State more, and the nation will be
proportionately enabled to pay for the war out of its own pocket. A
second proposition, equally simple, and equally true, is this. If you
spend less, you either reduce the cost and volume of our imports, or
you leave a larger volume of commodities available for export.

The state of the trade balance between ourselves and other countries
at this moment affords grounds--I do not say for anxiety, but for
serious thought. If you look at the Board of Trade returns for the
first five months--that is, to the end of the month of May--of the
present year--you will find, as compared with the corresponding period
of last year, that our imports have increased by thirty-five and a
half millions; while our exports and re-exports have decreased by
seventy-three and three-quarter millions. What does that mean? It
means a total addition in five months of our indebtedness to other
countries of nearly a hundred and ten millions, and if that rate were
to continue till we reached the end of a completed year, the figure of
indebtedness would rise to over two hundred and sixty millions.

That is a serious prospect, and I want to ask you, and those outside,
how can that tendency be counteracted? The answer is a very simple
one--by reducing all unnecessary expenditure, first, of imported
goods--familiar illustrations are tea, tobacco, wine, sugar, petrol; I
could easily add to the list--and that would mean that we should have
to buy less from abroad; and next, as regards goods which are made at
home--you can take as an illustration beer--setting a larger quantity
free for export, which means that we have more to sell abroad, and
enable capital and labour here at home to be more usefully and
appropriately applied. That may seem a rather dry and technical
argument--(laughter)--but it goes to the root of the whole matter.

If you ask me to state the result in a sentence, it is this: All money
that is spent in these days on superfluous comforts or luxuries,
whether in the shape of goods or in the shape of services, means the
diversion of energy which can be better employed in the national
interests, either in supplying the needs of our fighting forces in the
field or in making commodities for export which will go to reduce our
indebtedness abroad.

And,