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

428 DER FUEHRER— was sick of reparations; Hoover's moratorium had actually endedthem. The structure of international political debts was tottering; theworld economy was beginning to dissolve into great separate blocks;gold, the international standard of value, the universal medium ofexchange, was losing its dominant position. The world of 1924 wasreally collapsing, and in 1931 this was again recognized by one of thegreat world powers: England.In 1929, the Labour Party had returned to power. It was the secondMacDonald government, socialist in name. In 1931, under the pressureof the crisis, which also in England took the form of a financialstringency, James Ramsay MacDonald and a few of his comrades splitaway from the majority of the Labour Party. MacDonald founded agroup of his own which he called the National Labour Party, andformed a coalition with his opponents, the Conservative Party (theLiberals had lost their former importance with the fall of Lloyd Georgein 1922). This coalition took the decisive step that had been an object ofimpassioned controversy for years: it detached the English pound fromthe gold standard. With far greater caution and incomparably firmercontrol, this was basically the same thing that brought chaos and ruin toGermany in 1920-23; a thing which the German government franticallyfeared. A pound was now no longer a pound; its value fell from $4.89 to$3.49, thus giving a strong impetus to British exports. The stringenteconomy measures of the new government temporarily plunged thecountry into unrest; there were riots in London and other cities, in oneplace even a mutiny in the navy; but the government stood firm,dissolved Parliament, and in the elections of October 27, 1931, thecountry approved the new policy by giving a majority of almost fivehundred seats to the government coalition, or, to all intents andpurposes, the Conservative Party. Hitler, already dreaming of the daywhen, like Napoleon III, he would order elections and plebiscites in hiscountry, said of MacDonald's electoral accomplishment: 'TheMacDonald government clearly demonstrated to the whole world thenational urge for self-preservation. This was not only fair, but alsological from the standpoint of democracy' — of the democracy which,as Hitler hoped, would destroy itself.After these elections the MacDonald cabinet ruled for five years.