My dear Prime Minister,

IMPERIAL AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH CONFERENCE

The whole of this week has been very fully engaged with the
Imperial Agricultural Research Conference. The Plenary Sessions
are being held in the Grand Committee Room in Westminster Hall,
which forms an imposing setting. In spite of the fact that the
English Ministry of Agriculture, which is a highly inefficient
body, has control of the arrangements for the Conference, I think
we can anticipate a very useful and interesting Conference which
should advance the cause of agricultural research throughout the
Empire to a very considerable extent. Already the Plenary
discussions have been most useful and after tomorrow we shall get
to grips with subjects in Committee.

Last Monday the Australian delegation and myself had a long
preparatory discussion and I suggested to Julius [1] that he
should cable you asking leave to extend, on behalf of the
Commonwealth Government, an invitation to the Conference to hold
its next meeting in Australia. We were very delighted to receive
your immediate response, which was communicated to Bledisloe [2]
and Lovat. [3] The real discussion as to future Conferences will
not occur until towards the end of the Conference but I hope that
it may be possible to get a provisional acceptance of the idea of
the next meeting being held in Australia.

On the first day of the Conference Walter Guinness, the Minister
of Agriculture, addressed the Conference and the same evening the
Government gave a banquet in the Royal Gallery of the House of
Lords where Walter Guinness again was the chief speaker. I
listened to him with feelings of the deepest regret that it was
not possible for you to have delivered one of the speeches. It was
a magnificent opportunity such as you would have availed yourself
of in the most effective way but Guinness was uninspiring and not
very effective.

You will be interested to hear that the only overseas delegate who
has been asked to initiate a discussion in the Plenary Conference
is Julius. He is to speak on the question of the interchange of
information this afternoon.

I enclose copy of an article on the Conference which I wrote for
Hilton Young [4], who is, as you know, the Editor in Chief of the
'Financial News', and which he published on Wednesday as the
leading feature of that day's issue.

TARIFF BOARD'S REPORT

This morning's 'Times' published a cabled summary of the Tariff
Board's Annual Report. From that summary it appears as if the
Tariff Board had strongly stressed the danger of indiscriminate
Protection. [5] If this is the case, it is very satisfactory to
think that the Tariff Board itself is becoming aware of how
unsound such a policy is. There is, however, one phrase in the
summary which rather startled me. The 'Times' report refers to
'the ever widening gaps between the standards (of living)
maintained in the Commonwealth and the United Kingdom'.

This suggests that the standard of living in Australia is
continually rising while the British standard of living is either
stationary or at least not increasing at the same rate as that in
Australia. I very much doubt whether it is possible to
substantiate this statement if it was actually made by the Tariff
Board. [6]

With the difference in the cost of living between Australia and
Great Britain and with the undoubted fact that if you take the
remuneration of the whole of the working classes of Great Britain
into account, that remuneration has definitely increased during
recent years. I should imagine that the difference in real wages
between Australia and Great Britain has tended to narrow rather
than to be an ever widening gap. That question is of sufficient
importance to make it worth while to attempt to obtain true facts
and I shall try to get further data on the subject which I will
forward to you.

Yours sincerely,
F. L. MCDOUGALL