This eBook is a reproduction produced by the National Library of New Zealand from source material that we believe has no known copyright. Additional physical and digital editions are available from the National Library of New Zealand.
EPUB ISBN: 978-0-908327-79-9
PDF ISBN: 978-0-908330-75-1
The original publication details are as follows:
Title: John Macmillan Brown lectures : 1941
Author: Henderson, A. G. (Alexander Gunn)
Published: Whitcombe & Tombs, Christchurch, N.Z., 1941
University of New Zealand
JOHN MACMILLAN BROWN
LECTURES
1941
BY A. G. HENDERSON, Esq., M.A
THE NATIONAL LIBRARY
OF NEW ZEALAND
PREFACE
John Macmillan Brown, [846 [935, first attended the University of Glasgow and thence went to Oxford with a -mall Exhibition. He occupied the (hair of Classics and English at Canterbury College in the University of New Zealand, 1874-9, and that of English, History, and Political Economy from 1879 till his resignation in 1895. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University, 1916-23, and Chancellor from January 1923 till his death in January :
In his will he provided funds for a short course of lectures each year on any one or more of hi- hooks or their theme- "by men of eminence in the department 01- departments to which the hook- -el. ng, the lecturer to be allowed to choose the University centre in which he will deliver hi- course, such lecturer- to he selected each year by the Senate of the University of New Zealand so long a- that University -hall 'mue to exist and. if and w hen it ceases, by the Corporation mterbury Collef
The University selected Mr. Alexander!.. Henderson, M A.. a distinguished journalist and one of Professor Brown's students in English, History and Political Economy, a- the first Macmillan Brown Memorial Lecturer. The lectures were delivered at Canterbury University College, Christchurch, on June K>th. 23rd and 30th, 1941, the subjects hem- John Macmillan Brown as a Founder of the College, as Author, and as Educationist. The Chair was taken by Mr. A. E. Flower! M A . M Sc, Chairman of the Canterbury University Colli il, who. in introducing the Lecturer, said:—
SSOR John Macmillan Brown, who died in mad.' provision in his will for a series of lectures, to be known as "The Macmillan Brown Lecture-", on subjects connected either with his books or with his work. His interests were many and varied. He was Professor oi Classics, English and History at Canterbui from 1874 until 1879, and then Professoi of English, History and Political Economy until the end of 1895, whi med. He tinned to be a member of the University Senate and was Vice Chancellor and then Chancellor of the University, so that throughout hi- long life he was intimately concerned in the education system of New Zealand At the same time he developed wide extra mural interests. He studied deeply, for instance, anthropolo ethnology, and devoted much time to original research
3
:in - <>"' peoples of the Pacific Ocean, their origin languages and history, and he wrote much on the problems ot the region. I In- work kept an ever-active body and mind on the move through a long and vigorous lifetime and no doubl it will furnish material of absorbing interest in the future. It 1- right that one who has done so much for the community should be recalled to memorv from time to time in this maimer.
He was a man who had the cause of education truly at heart. His generosity in this direction was considerable during his lifetime, and at the end he left all he had, subject to certain life interests, to tin- cause. Naturally Canterbury College will benefit most, but the University of New Zealand has also shared. Among his benefaction's to Canterburv I niversity College are:
The Helen Macmillan Brown bursaries established in 1920 in memory of his wife, formerly Lady Principal of the Girls' High School and the first woman graduate of tin- ( ollege. These bursaries wen- supplemented by him in 10 [o.
The Macmillan Brown Prize for English Composition, founded in 1923 on the occasion of the jubilee of the «
Ihe large and valuable library of about 14,000 books, together with the sum of £2500 for housing it, and provision for at least £3OO a year to keep it up to date. These were provided for in hi- will in January 1935. The library will be housed in the new library to be built at this College in the near future and it will be kept intact.
residue of the estate will be used to found and establish hool of Pacific Ocean Studies (as far as funds permit) and to extend the Helen .Macmillan Brown bursaries at Connon Hall.
To the New Zealand University he gave the capital fund to establish the .Macmillan Brown Research Scholarship in Agriculture. This is of the value of £2OO a year and is awarded every second year. When he became Chancellor he supplemented the endowment of the University Prize for English Composition which had been established by his students in 1896. To Otago University, also, he presented a fund to establish an annual prize for English Composition.
The lectures which he endowed are to be delivered from tunc to tunc by persons nominated by the Senate of the New Zealand University. The honour of being the first Macmillan Brown Lecturer has been accorded to Mr. A. G. Henderson, a graduate of the University, an old student of Pro Brown's, and one of his intimate friends.
4
John Macmillan Browna Founder of the College
This is. as you know, the first oi a series of memorial lectures for which Professor Brown made provision in hi- will, and it i- particularly appropriate that the initial address should be delivered in this hall on the Commemoration Day of the University College of which John Macmillan Brown was one of the original professorial staff, and of which he was assuredly one of the founders.
It would be interesting to consider which of all his students now living MacmUlan Brown would himself have chosen to deliver the first of the memorial lecture- that he endowed: and if I have read the man. and the teacher, aright, hi- choice would have fallen on the one who, in his view and in the view of hi- fellow men. had most consistently applied in his own life the doctrine of work, the maxim that only by consistent, continuous and purposeful labour can man build his character and achieve the kind of success that make- life worth the living. More and more towards the end of hi- long life did Macmillan Brown deplore what he called the mechanization of society. And he did not mean by that the multiplication of machines. "What he did mean was the decay of individualism, the substitute of ma-- action for individual effort, the growing dependence of the individual on the State, the development of "managed" societies, "managed" money, "managed" economy- -admirable idea-, many of them, a- he -aid. but utialh feature- of a mechanical age. He -aw mechanical iwing up in Russia, in Italy, and in Germany. I!- saw, or thought he saw, similar movement- beginning in Australia and feared such developments in New Zealand.
It was a subject to which he returned again and again in the conversations of his later year-. Hi- mind was much occupied with the consequences, social, religious and inteltual, of this advance of the machine age. He did not talk readily of religion, but often deplored the decline of conscience, national and individual, and attributed it to the decline of religious faith. The civilized world, he said, had devoted itself to the creation and accumulation of wealth. Economic aims were dominant. There had I < tion or a revolt against the age of romanticism, but the world needed another age oi romanticism to correct the evils of the times. Then not wanting signs of such a reaction, he thought, though some of them were strangely puerile, like the interest in palmistry, (iip-reading. astrology, and Mich superstitions; but the world
5
ally in the grip of one vasl superstition, namely that it could find salvation in universal idleness. The apostles and preacher- of tin- modern evangel might not agree as to the precise mean- of grace, but they were all hastening to the -time destruction. Blind leader- of the blind! "There is no substitute for human labour," hi- -aid. "Only by the habit of work can any nation or any race save itself; only by work can any man be saved. Labour i- the essence of life. To cease work is to die."
That, a- I understand him. i- the message that .Macmillan Brown would have a-ked the lecturer to put into word-; and In- choice of a lecturer would have fallen beyond doubt on one w hose life had been a ■ onsistent expression of the message. Ala-! 1 am not that man. It was flattery on the part of the University Senate to have nominated me to deliver the inaugural address. Virtually my only qualifications are the admiration I had for the man, my affection toward- him, and an abiding loyalty to his memory.
It l- not proposed in this series of lectures to compile a formal biography of Macmillan Brown or even attempt a character -ketch, but some few notes are necessary for an understanding of the man and the teacher, if only to date him. He was a Scotch lad. born at Irvine in Ayrshire on May sth, 1846, so that he belonged very much to the Victorian era. and the influences that shaped hi- character and hi- career and that determined his views on education during the : of his immediate association with this college were exclusively Victorian. No doubt it was fortunate for New Zealand that he was a product of the Scottish Educational system and that he was not afraid of heresies that the conventional English educationist would have condemned; and fortunate also that he had < ome under the influence of Principal Caird, of Glasgow, before he went up to Oxford t<> -it under Benjamin Jowett, the famous Master of Balliol. But even so it was with difficulty that he fought his way out of the strong and narrow currents of Victorianism.
There is no doubt that when Macmillan Brown started his work in Canterbury the Balliol influence was pronounced. It could scarcely have been otherwise, for at Balliol he was in contact with men already famous and with men who wire to hold high office in Church and State. The Master seemed to have the faculty of compelling intellectual efficiency, and when his pupil- went into the world they seemed to take the high places as by right. Milner, Curzon, Lansdowne, Asquith, and Grey were all Balliol men. How long the Jowett influence persisted with Brown it i- impossible now- to say. There are indication-, perhaps not strong, that after a few years in this
6
young country he was beginning to doubt whether there would ever be a New Zealand Balliol and whether, in fact. it would be an advantage to New Zealand if there were. However, he has himself written at length of hi-- Oxford days, and perhaps in the future some one will find in the autobio graphical notes the material for another series of lecture-. My own opinion, for what it is worth, is that a- a teacher ami, remembering the period, he was perhaps the greatest New Zealand ha- had -he drew his inspiration from Caird and not from Jowett.
It was at the end of 1873 that the Hoard of Governors of nterbury College, then in process of formation, resolved to appoint a Professor of Classics, History and English Literature, and to call for applications in the United Kingdom. It nominated as the committee of selection in England Lord Lyttelton, as Chairman; the Rev. Benjamin Jowett, of Balliol College, Oxford; Pi Beeley, of Cambridge; and Professor Blackie, of Edinburgh; and for the guidance of these gentlemen it drew up a memorandum.
"The gentleman chosen (it ran) should be young and out who gives promise of future excellence. It is indispi that he should 1 i lassical scholar, that he should havi graduated in classical honours, and that the position he took should be high enough to be a guarantee of his scholarship,
"Mere scholarship, however, is by no means sufficient, and it is not in fact desirable that anyone should be chosen whose tastes run solely in the direction of philological criticism. What is wanted is a man who has studied the classical author- as sources of history and literature.
"It will be observed that the Professorship is of History and English Literature a- well as the Classics. The chosen should give evidence of a fondness for historical studies and be thoroughly acquainted with the English language and literature.
"Whatever the religious or political opinions of the person chosen may be, care should be taken that he be of sufficient discretion to avoid partisanship in teaching history.
"The person chosen must be a good teacher and be willing to submit to the drudgery of teaching the elements oi I ttii and Greek. Son.' tudents will be more advanced, but the majority will know very little of any language but their own. The object of the College is to create a demand for culture, which does not exist at present in any perceptible degree, and the first steps must be laborious."
The choice of the selectors fell on John Macmillan Brown, ttish scholar whose academic career had been brilliant.
7
I : a Master of Art- and a former Snell Exhibitioner. He was then twenty-eighl years ~f age.
He -aid himself that he expected to be in New Zealand for perhaps three or four years; he remained here, except for periodic journeys abroad, until he died in 1935.
For loin- years he held the combined (hair of Classics, History and English Literature, and for the next seventeen years hew a- Professor of the English Language and Literature, History and Political Economy. He retired, because of ill health, in [895, but he continued a member of the University Senate, to winch he had been appointed in 1877, and from [923 until hi- death he wa- Chancellor of the University.
When Macmillan Brown came to Christchurch at the end oi 1874 the University of New Zealand was taking shape, but what that shape was to be was -till the subject of infinite controversy, embittered by political jealousies. Within the previous thirty years the islands hail been colonized not by a general emigration but by a specialized scheme of separate communities, and there were in 1874 four main settlements and several -mailer ones, more or less isolated by lack of communications and intensely concerned in their local affairs. In the matter of higher education both Otago and Canterbury had -1 heme- of their own, and when a movement for the creation ot a New Zealand university developed in the sixties it made slow progress because of tin- difficulty of reconciling tic , onflicting opinions of the provincial lead'
It is not necessary to go into the details of the arguments now, however interesting they may be to historians of the University, but it must have been disturbing to the professors new ly arriving from England to find that they w ere compelled, whether they liked it or not, to become partisans in discussions that, at the time, must have meant little or nothing to them. Otago in 1869 had stolen a march on the rest of the colony by establishing a University of its own, and although Ot subsequently agreed to come into the national scheme the sentiment in favour of a separate university was by no means dead. The only point that need concern us here, however, is that if the newly formed Canterbury College had not achieved early and pronounced success the dominant position University would not have been challenged and within a decade University education might have been concentrated to all intents and purposes in Dunedin. That possibility iignored by the historians, but no one who turns back to the records of the old debate- can have any doubt that it existed. It was not the fact that Canterbury established a university ge that determined the polii y of the colony in regard to
8
higher education for the next fifty years; it wa- not the fact that the Provincial Council, inspired by Tancred and Rolleston, had given the Canterbury institution twice the endowments of the Otago University; it was the fact that Canterbury established standards at least equal to those of Otago. And the quick success of Canterbury was due, in very large measure, to the enthusiasm and ability of John Macmillan Brown.
What he thought of the controversies it i- difficult at this time to say. He was in the habit of forming quick decisions, but we have his own assurance that he could change his mind and did -o in regard to at least one of the outstanding issues. I can recall a few conversations with him. not many and not serious, concerning the very early days of the College, but it wa- evident that with the lapse of a quarter of a century he treated the old controversies a- being of -mall import and as having been settled by the work of the royal commission of 1878, of which he wa- a member. Indeed, if any reference were made to the old day- his talk very -0011 -witched to the first students, to their amazing enthusiasm, the amount of work they did and had to do, and the demand- upon his own - "Until the Chair of Classics, History and English Literature wa- divided he had to work, in term time, sixteen or eighteen hour- a day. And we have the evidence of his students that if be worked himself he did not -pare his pupils.
I think we can safely leave these old controversies. The curious may read a very lively accounl of them in Dr. Beaglehole's history of the University, and although there i- a temptation to extract from the minute- of the Royal Commission and from later public speeches statements that might indicate Brown's reactions, the matter, though interesting, is outside the scope of the present address.
Pi rhaps I may pause here to say that the contest between Otago University and Canterbury College in the early days Keen one, not without touches of bitterness. There is no doubt that Macmillan Brown deliberately set himself to beat the performances of the Otago in-titution, not from any al motive, but because he knew what was at -take. If Otago had four honour- students Canterbury had five, and the competition for such prize- and scholarships as were offering was intense. Nowaday- the competitive spirit finds expression in the annual athletic gatherings. Fifty years ago and sixty years ago it expressed it-elf almosl wholly in the academic arena.
There is little purpose in recalling the figures of the successes of the university colleges in the early day-, but the curious may turn to the old university calendars. They will
9
find that Canterbu iblished a dominant position in the first dei ade and never lost it while Macmillan Brown wa- teaching. In truth the standard set by Canterbury Colli in languages and literature wa- so high that it wa- difficult for a student from outside to gain first-class honours. Of the award- of the How en Prize for an essay in English when Macmillan Brown retired hi- -indent- had won thirteen, Otago two Of the John i inline scholarships in English his students had won seven, ' Itago two.
But it is more to the purpose to inquire the reasons for Macmillan Brown's immediate success as a teacher for his suci ess was immediate and it was striking. He was an enthusiast, he believed implicitly in the gospel of work, he was intensely in earnest, he had from the beginning the habit of authority and he was thorough. He was dogmatic, of course, from the beginning to the end. for his training and the circumstances in which he commenced teaching in New Zealand had compelled him to be so. The schoolmaster in In- experience was an authority. The duty of the pupil was to learn, the duty of the master to teach. It may be that ording to present day theories his method- were wri his approach may have been wrong, even his purpose may have been wrong. Perhaps in a later day someone \\ ill examine his work in the light of modern doctrines. But this is true, that when he came to New- Zealand he found hen it ion of students pleading to be taught, he found an enthusiasm that laeked direction, he found an atmosphere entirely new in hi- ex] erience, and he found a type of education entirely unsuited to that atmosphere. A- he himself -aid. he had to adapt himself to colonial conditions, for the most part unexpected, and it was to hi- Scottish training that he owed the ability so to adapt himself.
Regarding his enthusiasm and his capacity for work we have ii" need to rely on tradition. There is documentary evidence. When the University Commission was sitting in Christchurch complaints were made, not by students but by others interested, of the late hours at night to \\ hich the classi s extended. Complaints wen- certainly justified in the early days, when footpaths were unformed, road- were bad, the streets were not lighted, and students had to carry lanterns with them when they went home. Macmillan Brown habitually lectured until to p.m. and as often as nol his classes dispersed half an hour later still. But in addition to the scheduled , lasses he was ready to give extra coaching to students who sought it. and it is on record that he used to have a special class for sighl translation on alternate days for Latin and Greek, from - to 8 in the mornii
IO
The amazing thing i- that the students took it and apparently enjoyed it. In fact, 1 recall that one of the first students described this early morning meeting a- a delightful and even jolly class, and he meant it. There i- no doubt th.it if he did nothing else the professor infected the students with his own enthusiasm. In my own day we finished at ".'.- or 7.30 in the evening and -tatted again at o a.m.. and in the winter, with a professor spreading himself in front of the only lire in the lecture room, we thought ourselves Spartan-. I wonder how in these time- of the forty-hour week the students would react to a lecture spread from 7 a.m. to 10.30 p.m.! Perhaps it is just a- well that there were only a dozen or so students to be satisfied in those distant days. It i- evident that students, a- well a- professor, took themselves and their work very seriously.
There is another fact to be emphasized. Macmillan Brown was a man of deep and sincere human sympathy and understanding, and the tributes that have been paid to him by his first students suggest that it was this quality that enabled him to draw out the very best in them. While he drove them hard he was careful, like a good drover, to nurse the weaker ones along. In my day we youngsters stood very much in awe of him, In the first place he made it very clear that a university student could not be as irresponsible as a schoolboy. A lad of seventeen who found himself addressed, perhaps for the first time, as “Mister” had necessarily to be on his best behaviour. If discipline threatened to be lax there was a prompt rebuke, and it was a sharp one. He had learned from Jowett at Balliol the force of sarcasm as a disciplinary weapon. It seems to have been one of Jowett’s least pleasant characteristics that he could not resist scoring off ignorance. Macmillan Brown was gentler in his method, but he could be crushing when he rebuked an erring student who ought to have known better. Make an unfortunate guess in class and there would come over his face an expression of benignity. A pause and we knew what was coming. “Ah! Mr. Henderson! Then the dictionaries are all wrong”; or “Come, Mr. Hight, your edition must be later than mine; it is not so in my text-book.” The classic story of the kind dates from the days when Latin was one of his subjects. A red-faced student was called on to do sight translation into Latin, He started “Hie”, and then paused to search his memory for the next word. “Is that a pronoun or an interjection?” inquired the professor.
But I never remember him to have called on a timid or nervous student to do an exercise before a class of any size, though he always counted viva voce work to be important. And though a student might encounter a scorching sarcasm
11
on occasion In- was just a- likely to be called into the professor's study ami then- helped with advice and books from the big library.
He had to combine, of course, the function- of professor and tutor, and it i- very evidenl that, in the word- of the memorandum oi qualifications, ho submitted at once to the drudgery of teaching. It i- easy to say now that he moulded the minds of hi- students all too completely and that he stifled initiative anil originality. The truth i- that very early in hi- colonial life he deliberately restricted the field of his work. He saw that what the colony needed most was teachers; and while he might say—and did say publicly that the university ought to carry the light into all walk> of life, he conceived hi- particular job a- being the teaching of teachers.
When the time came for him to retire he had reason to claim that in this direction, at any rate, hi- labours had been not unsuccessful. His influence and his method- had been carried into virtually all the secondary schools of the country. Already in the early eighties students came from all partof the colony to attend his lecture-, and as his reputation as a teacher was carried abroad his classes grew beyond the capacity of the lecture theatre and he was compelled to divide them. And this was at a time when the roll of the College had fewer than 150 name-.
Looking back one might be disposed to suggest that his vision was narrow, judged by present day idea-, but I am not prepared to make that criticism. He was a Victorian, with the Victorian outlook and the Victorian attitude towards education. Probably it never occurred to him. during the period of his association with this College, to question the fundamental- of education. It oa urs to few of us even to-day to do so. He probably felt himself to be making a revolutionary •ion when he chose the Chair of English Language and Literature in preference to that of the Classii s. It was, in truth, a very natural idea that the people of a young country like New Zealand should make their approach to culture through their own language, but the culture he had in mind was essentially of the classical type. It could scarcely have been otherwise considering the traditions in which he had been brought up. To this day the idea persists in many quarters that a man can be considered educated or cultured although he may be completely ignorant of the place of mankind in the physical universe. In my own time we us to be told that one of the great purposes of a university was to teach the individual how to live, and yet ninety-five per of the students went through the university course without ever receiving a scrap of biological instruction, and
1 2
what biological instruction was given in the schools and college- w as purely utilitarian. I am not -lire that the position is very much better to-day.
Classicalism -till has a Strong hold on education, though not quite the stranglehold that it had last century, lor while the dead language- have lost their place in the schools the influence of the tradition persists. You see it in the importance attached to philology in the teaching of English and even in the approach to history and in the teaching of it. The Substitution of life for etymology a- the basis tion i- painfully -low.
However Macmillan Brown's idea- may have changed in hi- later life anil they changed greatly -one can trace through all hi- teaching and all hi- published lecture- the intention, conscious or unconscious, to lead his students to a type of culture that was essentially classical. The temptation to develop this theme i- great, but it would lead me too far afield.
One or two other criticisms used to be heard—that his treatment of English was too analytical, too mechanical; that he made a fetish of examinations; that hi' supp originality and that no student of his was ever enco to aim at the -tar-. The first point i- one for the experts, mainly, though I have my own opinion. Whatever appreciation I have of the beauty of language, whatever understanding I have of the essentials of style, 1 owe in large measure to .Macmillan Brown.
It is true that he valued examination- highly. Life was a of examination-, he told the student- in an address in 1882. "You will find before you have made main- steps into the world that instead of all your examinations being past they have but begun. . . . Life is one long system of examinations with a far severer -train of competition and a larger and more exacting body of examiner- than you have yet met with. In life you will find nothing worth the having that i- to be won without the struggle of competition and the stronge-t criticism from your compeer-. Now educatio preparation for life i- life in miniature. It ir- therefore a mi-take to suppose that true education can go on without examination." He was to repeat the sentiment in a tract on education a quarter of a century later.
The third criticism raises a more difficult question. Macmillan Brown'- own view was that the habit of work did no man harm. "In any sphere", he said, "the untiring application of vigour and thought will make its mark; in a sphere specially fitted for a man's nature such application will meet with a success that onlooker- will attribute to a
I.s
1 gift of heaven." At the -ante time I doubt if he ever eni ouraged a student to aspire to the stars. Sham says that the Balliol type succeeded because it did not pitch its ideal too high. And I recall one of .Macmillan Brown's own aphorisms that possibly echoed Jowett: "It is no had thin,;,' to have a distant and ambitious ideal in the future; but keep it out of sight. I'he kingdom of heaven i- within you," he said once; "there i- no need to go wandering in search of it." And he quoted the story of the man wh feed his father- asses and found a kingdom. "Do not", said he, "go out to found a kingdom and find only your father's asses."
It is certain that, at any rate in my daw no student was encouraged to practise idealism. What the Balliol attitude may have been 1 do not know, but as Macmillan Brown expressed it the important thing was not knowledge for its own >ake but the application of it. "The wisest thoughts of our greatest thinker-", he told hi- students, "are but newversions of the ten commandments. The world continually demand- new thinkers to restate the code. The infinite variety of life demand- infinite adjustment of its fundamental truths."
He had a passion for work more than a pa—ion. You will find running through all his published speeches and 1. thi- theme that work is the salvation of mind and body. Lei me make a brief quotation from one of the latest chapters of Peoples and Problems of the Pacific. "The law of struggle is the basis not only of racial advance but of racial health and racial continuance. No species can exist if it is not subject to it. And under it work is the first necessity of existence. Any organ of our bodies that is not in exi to function and becomes a source of disease and death. So it i- with individuals in a community and with communities and races that make up mankind; shelter them from strug and work will soon cease and with it all health and fertility. The twin curses of disease and sterility lie upon the idle. The old-fashioned paradises of leisure and pleasure which have become the new- Utopias in so many of the programmes and political platforms of labour are based more upon desire than upon an insight into nature or human nature. Their realisation would mean the stagnancy that is practically death."
This same theme was developed in one way or another in all his early addresses. In 1881 he devoted a great pan of an address to a society of students to "the central fallacy —that work is the bane of existence —the primeval curse, that slumber is more sweet than toil." "The mechanic §
M
to his hammer, the merchant to his desk, every man to his toil, with the latent regret, 'All things have rest; why should we toil alone? We only toil who are the firsl of things; 1 and back they return in the evening with the thought that they have done their day'- penance and merit at feasl a -light relaxation of the primeval curse. Rusting to death they count the ideal of a happy old age. and dying in harness they lament as the crown of misfortune. Paradise they regrel lost garden of indolence, heaven they picture as a lotus-eating land, a yawnless languor, a -on of waking slumber, and saints they portray as the lazzaroni of God. Before them they keep as a stimulus to present toil the prospect of future years of toillessness; but like the donkey of fable that had the carrot tied to it- no-e by it- master they are no nearer tin' fulfilment of their de-ire at the end of the race than they were at the beginning. For, heaven be thanked, life is an unending battle: a pause in the battle means sickne;ation death. . . . To hug life, as our instincts make us do, and at the same time gird againsl work that i- the very life of life i< not unlike the reasoning of the Irishman who thought the moon was worth a dozen of the sun, because it -hone in the night time, just when we wanted light."
If I dwell on this subject it is not because it has a bearing on current political thought but because it is the ke3 - to the character of Macmillan Brown. He believed that constant occupation for mind and hand was the secret of happinc--and that intelligently directed work was the prime condition of success in any sphere.
"Happy is the man", he exclaimed, "who either instinctively or from early experience recognize- that labour is of the He does not work to live but lives to work." "Look into the careers and characters of the great men of the past and you will find in them the rapid recognition of the facts of their own nature and of the sphere they have to work in, the ready discrimination of the possible from the impossible, the most skilful adaptation of means to i and above all the cheerful acceptance of life as work. Not only the greatest conquerors, but the greatest thinkers, the greatest inventors, the greatest poets have been incarnations of the spirit of work."
U1 L11C 3pm UX V> U1 IS.. Or again, take this comment on the problem of leisure. “Change of toil is the truest rest, and complete absorption in work is the most wholesome solitude.”
"Work, work, work! the cure of idle talk! Half the malice and lies of this world are tin- producl of idle hours and idle tongues" he told the students in the Diploma Day address the following year. And he proceeded in a strain that cannot
15
have been pleasing to some of hi- hearer-, "Thi- i- the secret of the mischief that colonial new-paper- and colonial legislatures -o frequently do. The new-paper- have so many columns to liil and even the most ill-founded rumour i- a godsend. Li i ure, 100, ha- a certain period to pa-- every year in legislating and speech-making, and customs that might well ter themselves are carried into mischievous law-, just to fill up the time, and so exi ellent institution- are made the vehicle oi falsity and -ham. Now that i- a -tate of things which need- cure and my greal hope with regard to this University is that the habits of solid work which her graduates have acquired will go out with them into the country and purify it- literary and political atmosphere.
Parenthetically it may he observed that thi- was one of the rare occasions on which he expressed any open opinion on politics. Though journalism was a more frequent victim of hi- sarcasm, he did not regard it a- beyond redemption. and in after years he paid tribute to the high moral standard of the New Zealand journals, declaring that journalism had taken the place of the church and that in thi- profession lay the spiritual destiny of the nation. Hut politic- he called a .ante. Tin- political manoeuvrings ol the seventi eighties repelled him. the deal- and e, iunter-deal-. of which the purposes seemed so obvious and sometimes so obviously corrupt, disgusted him, and he could see no reformatio: through a revolt of the masses that might substitute ignorant enthusiasm for commercial greed. Later lie was to pour out hi- pent-up feelings in some merciless chapters of Riallaro, the strange and mordant satire of which New Zealanders knew nothing for thirty years after it wa- compli
Now you have borne with me quite long enough and I seem not even to have indicated what manner of man Macmillan Brown was. There will be other opportunities of speaking of his work after he left this College, but I want to recall one characteristic that helped to make him the teacher that he was. He knew how to probe the mind of the student. If at one time you encountered ih his sarcasm, at another he would talk to you as if your difficulties and your troubles, your fears or your ambitions, were thi' only matter- thai engaged hi- mind. If he decided that you were worth helping, the help was ottered in gi - measure. For main' years, following Jowett's example, he would have his students in relays to breakfast on Sundays. Later, when perhaps he judged the students to he a softer race, he summoned them on Saturday afternoons. But he gave many an hour of hi- own leisure to individual students who sought his advice. If at time- we thought him a slave-
[6
driver some ol us came to regard him with genuine affection. And one at least ha- happy memories of hour- in hi- study when he discoursed on book- or letter- or men. or in the garden that he loved when he related how he had acquired tins or that strange or beautiful plant.
In tins address I have to remember him as one of the founders o( Canterbury University College. There were great men. men of vision, among those who prepared the ground and we rightly honour them. But as I read the history of this fine institution and think of the wide and abiding influence that it has had in the life not only of this province but of the whole Dominion I can accord to no man anion- all its builders a greater part than that of John Macmillan Brown
17
Macmillan Brown -as author
The purpose 01 the Macmillan Brown Lecture Endowment i- really to give a measure of en< ouragement to the study of the subjects in which the Professor was so deeply interested in the la-t part of hi- long life. Particularly he had in mind the problem- of the Pacific Ocean, it- history, it- peoples, its languages, and it- politics, and I think a- the year- go on e lecture- will be found to deal mainly, if not exclusively, with -tuh subjects. But 1 hope that education will not be entirely overlooked and thai from time to time there will be surveys of educational progress, especially of the movements that have had their beginnings in this century and have interrupted so tragically in Europe.
In this lecture 1 -hall mention the literary essays and bookon the Pacific only briefly, because I want to give a little more time to hi- two work- of imagination, Riallaro and Limanora, which are not so well known as they deserve to be. It is by these two book-, I think, that Macmillan Brown's plai e in literature will lie determined.
His first published work of any considerable size was a Manual of English Literature, covering the period from 1750 to 1850. This was really a very typical example of his thoroughness as a teacher. The Senate in its wisdom decided to include Anglo-Saxon in the English Language prescription for the pass degree, and to make time for a class in \ saxon the Professor had to cut out one of his two weekly classes in lish Literature. Rather than scamp a subject he decided to revise some of his lecture notes and publish them in I form, and he gave up the whole of one long vacation to this task. The revision resolved itself virtually into the complete recasting of the note-, and though the work he planned was not actually completed, the volume published covered certain phases of the English literature of the period in a wry comprehensive way. It is a manual for students, of course, not for the general reader; but I have turned to some chapter- of it lately with genuine enjoyment. This book is the more inti 1 ing to the present audience because it includes an appendix of biographical note- of authors of the period that is also a model of thoroughness. It was prepared by James Hight. Macmillan Brown, by the way, was never content in his lei inti- to repeat or to echo the opinion- of others. He was a rapid reader, extraordinarily rapid, and he had the faculty
IS
ot remembering mu merely the essentials but often the very word- of hi- authors. Years afterwards he could -till quote irticular passage in some book and then turn to it to confirm the accuracy of hi- recollection. Hi- method in lecturing on the history of literature wa- to describe the characteristics of thi- school or that and place the books of the period in their proper relation to the literary, political, and social movements of the time. To me the literature class and the class devoted to literary criticism were the most interesting of the whole course. The analysis of what we called 5, book-, that i> to say, prescribed by the University study with a view to examination at the end of the year, never appealed to me in the same way. They were too thorough, and sometimes too discursive, and although I may turn to some of the printed volumes with interest and indeed with admiration. I still, after nearly half a century, have the feeling that the thought and art of these classics could 1 been discussed more profitably in fewer words.
Of Macmillan Brown'- books about the Islands thi to which the general reader will turn with most pleasure i- undoubtedly The Dutch East. Thi- 1- not just a travel book he wa- didactic in everything he wrote but it inone the less entertaining, full of shrewd observations on men and affairs and brightened by much of his own type of humour. Vet even when lie went to the Netherlands Indies for an extended holiday he hail to have a purpose in view, and I have no doubt that what took him there especially was the search for evidences of a Caucasian migration through Melanesia into the Pacific Ocean.
Very early in his inquiries concerning Polynesian origins he made up his mind thai the Polynesians were originally a Caucasian people and he was determined to prove it. Von will find the theory developed in Maori and Polynesian, published in 1007. the first of the volumes devoted to the n. The first Polynesians, he believed, were ints of a Caucasian people that had pushed their way east from the Mediterranean basin into Central Asia and ultimately had reached the shores of the Sea oi fapan. The first migration from the mainland to the islands, he thought, started from Korea. The megalithic remain- that are scattered over Polynesia he attributed to this race, which, he said, had left similar evidences of it- movements on the shores of the Atlantic, and in Northern Europe, before it passed through Central Ana
I do not propose to discuss this theory, or any other of Macmillan Brown's numerous theories in detail, hai competence for such a task, and in any case the controversies
ig
that have been aroused make it uninviting. However, there i- one comment that ought to he made, and it i- that Brown deliberately challenged tie- current theories because In believed that they were based on inadequate evidence and because he thought that they ought to he investigated. He dill not regard himself a- being peculiarly equipped foi the job. In faei, a- he -aid himself, hi- earliest approach to Pacific problems was philological. He wanted to see what light could be thrown on the problem of origin- by la: though he knew well that language and ra< e have no ni connection. Hi- first interest in the Pacific was linguistic. lb- heard men like Tregear and Percy Smith discussing language relation- and no doubt made up hi- mind to their statements if ever he should have the leisure and of course he was equipped for the study of this section of the inquiry. But it did not take him long to decide that the linguistic approach was the wrong one, and ho soon abandoned it. I recall drawing hi- attention some years later to the introduction to Macdonald's Oceanic I in which it irargued that the three group- of island languages, .Malagasy. Melanesian, and Polynesian, are all descended from thi parent a- the Semitic languages. It afforded evidence in favour of a theory of Brown'- that there had been a migration into Melanesia and possibly Polynesia from Southern Asia. But whereas Macdonajd hinted at a migration from southern Arabia, Brown thought the later Caucasian infiltration had come from India and although Macdonald's argument interested him he insisted that conclusions drawn from language relation- were always misleadii maid's point deserves more study than it has received from orthodox students, but the difficulty probably i- that students of Melanesian and Polynesian problem- have little acquaintance with the Semitic language-.
In Chapter 20 of Maori and Polynesian Macmillan Brown sets out the nature of the problem- with which he had I mainly concerned in writing the hook.
There are, he says, three problems. The first is the origin of the European-like face and figure of so main- Polynesi the second is the origin of the megalithic monuments; the third is the resemblance between the culture of Polynesia and that of British Columbia. Taking the three together he suggests that the explanation is that in the course of centuries tucasian people, which had had a maritime training, found it~ way to the Pacific coast of Asia. Seme crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska, other- took to the sea and peopled the Pacilie island-. In North America, a- in New Zealand, the tradition of -tone monument- was lost because the people
20
found big timber- that were far easier to work. Hut wherevei this race went it left its long head and its wavy hair.
The original migration into the Pacific was apparently by easy stages from island to island. It took the women with it. -o that the distances to be covered could not have been it. But with later changes the virtual laud bridge disap peared, so that subsequent migrations would be almost entirely of men.
This, he thinks, is the true explanation of the strangest problem of the region. "Why", he a-ks, "do we here encounter the Strangest medley of culture to be found on the lace of the earth? In analysing the industries, we saw that alongside art- that almost equal in their advance those of the most civilized of modern times, there are arts and practices that are primeval, and. in fact, palaeolithic. The Maori arts of fortification and sii ibsolutely abreast of modern Europe; yet here i- a people that i- not so advanced a- the Australians and Fuegians in fire-making, and not so advanced a- the Melanesians and Papuans in the making of out of iday. Their textile art showed great facility in the manipulation of both bark and fibre, and yet they had only the beginnings of a loom; nor had they reached a spindle in making the thread, an exception to all other primitive people-. Why should this early palaeolithic culture belong to the same people as -hows itself so modern in other phases? This is the fundamental problem of Polynesia, and no one can face satisfactorily it- other problems who has not solved this.
"The solution attempted in this volume is based on an analysis of the culture into the women's and the men's. The palaeolithic elements belong to the household arts; of the advanced culture belongs to the sphere of the men. Fire-making, spinning, and the art of pottery all belong to the women'- department in primitive time-. We may therefore infer that there has been unbroken continuity in lynesian household since early palaeolithic times, when the artificial production of lire by the rubbing together of two -tick- had just been discovered, when there was no spindle and no pottery. Now, the isolation of the region far out in the ocean makes it unique a- an abode of man. As long a- it wa- isleted, with vast distances between the islets themselves and between them and the mainland, none but larvoyaging canoe- could reach it, and that meant only masculine expedition-, only masculine colonisation. A few hundred miles Acre -tire to daunt primitive woman from venturing her children and her household goods upon so dangerous an element; the thousands of mile- between resting-places in Polynesia made such ventures impossible for them."
21
I'M nearly thirty years, a- I told him oi asion. io be pursuing the Caucasian head, the wavy hair, and the blond complexion north and south, east and in ihe Pacific Ocean He -pent month- in Japan, Korea, and China. He studied the hairy Ainu- in Saghalien. He visited the Malay Mate-, He spent five or six month- in tin- Netherlands East Indie-. He travelled the Pacifii coast of the Americas from Alaska to Chili. He -pent half his seventyseventh year on Easter Island, two thousand mile- from anywhere, all the time gathering note-, recording impres man could conceivably have digested in a lifetime all the information he accumulated. He jotted it all down Whether the mass ol note- still exists I do not know. I have seen some of it, written probably when he was tossing about on some island schooner, and wondered whether anyone but the writer himself would ever decipher the script. He corresponded all the while with other- who were interested in the problem-, and if the correspondence ha- been preserved it, too, -hould be a treasure-house for future students.
The holiday in the Dutch Indie- produ The month- spent on Easter Island had their result in The Riddle of the Pacific, in which he developed the theory that Easter Island was all that remained of a i( and populous archipelago. Whatever may be -aid of this theory or of the arguments in favour of it. the hook i- a i contribution to the discussion of an interesting and rather mysterious subject. It was an amazing undertaking for a man of seventy-seven year- thus to isolate himself from civilization in order to study at first hand a problem which had intrigued him and of which he had found no satisfactory solution, but he never shrank from hard-hip. He kept himself lit: the Spartan life had no tenor- for him. and he undertook journeys bv land or in -mall, dirty island school rim by huge cockroaches and reeking of copra, from which iim-i of us. half hi- age, would have instinctively recoiled Hi- energy was amazing and so was hi- endurance. He used to say himself that he had never overtaxed lungs or heart, and never applied hoi and rebellious liquors to his blood, and that he found the simple life tin- best corrective to luxurious livin!/.
After he had disposed of his Easter Island inquiries he gathered together notes that he had made over a period of a quarter of a century and published the two imposing volumes of Peoples and Problems of the Pacific. This was not intended to be a complete treatment of the vast subject, and it should not be read or criticized in that sense. It consists substantially of independent studies of the many
2 J
island communities of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, with a concluding section in which the general problem-, including the international political one-, are discussed at some length. 1 -hall not even attempt to summarize this big work. Hi- book-, and especially Peoples and Problems, are certain to form the subject matter of subsequent lecture-, so that no detailed examination i- here called for.
The developments that have occurred in the world during recent years give a special interest to the chapters in which Macmillan Brown discussed the position of Japan. He was a -indent of international relation- and he foresaw that economic considerations would compel Japan to adopt an expansionist policy. Long before he started to write about Pacific problem- he predicted that Russia and Japan would come into conflict. The Japanese would be compelled k a footing on the mainland, it only to solve the food problem for her ever-increasing population, and he predicted that -he would make a persistent bid for the dominant position in China, whose millions of people provided the nearest and most profitable market for her industries He i view of the trend of Japanese policy than most of the writers on the Far East, and his prediction- have proved to be remarkably accurate. The concluding section pies and Problems can be commended even to those whose interest in the archipelagoes i- remote.
The very bulk of Peoples and Problems repel- the presentday reader, whose common literary fare i- a detective story, but it i- well worth reading. It i- full of shrewd observations and stimulating comment. Let me make one quotation, from Chapter 4 of the book:
"Our own age has seen so main- ancient fallacies and exploded Utopias revived as new millennium pills that it is not surprising to find Rousseau's return-to-nature cure for all human ill- that ushered in the French revolution reappear. It i-. in fact, the basis of that most popular of all patent nes tor the purgation of original sin and unhappiness ilism. Dei back to natural conditions in which all men |ual, and have equal rights to everything including food and. perhaps, work; there is the last prescription which this age, the crown of all - thought it ha- first disire of all the evils that civilisation i- su] '. e DrodUl ell.
"It was exactly the prescription that, when applied in the end of tin- 18th century, brought in the age of military despotism and smashed Europe to pieces. It is founded on the fallacy that it is civilisation, and not nature, that has made men unequal. All that civilisation does is to concentrate
<=3
the evidences of the inequality in obtrusive patches. Never ha- the world seen sui hj concentration as in our daw Industrialism has massed not merely all the effi< iency, but all the weaknesses and -ore- of mankind in great centre-; and so the spiritual quacks have a splendid field to work on in - quasi-humanitarian sentiment that urban sights arouse, and the most patent of all patent medicines i- the return to the simplicity and equality of nature.
"If Europe had been a- near 10 the New Hebrides as Australia is it would doubtless have tried to get into touch with primitive men in order to test the truth oi Rousseau's picture of the simple, uncivilised life. It would soon have discovered what pasteboard figures Paul and Virginia were. We have sublimated Rousseauism not merely preached to u- from the street corner- but injected into our politics, our programmes and platform-, our parties and caucuses. Yet here at our door- we have it in living action for tens thousands of years. So-called nature ha- it all her own uav in the New- Hebrides, even now- that Europe, like Satan, ha- entered into her I
Life, he continued, was so easy that the little-or-no-work millennium of the socialists was brought almost within the limit- of possibility. Here, if anywhere, the inequalities and unhappiness attril uted to civilization should have disappeared. But what did he find' "This primitive people in remaining stagnant and primeval and free from civil:habits, including clothing, has, instead of being free from that Apollyon of the labour orator, capitalism, actually enthroned it. The only ruler- of the New Hebrides villi are the plutocrats. Society is founded on pigs, and the heraldry ol social rank consists of tusks."
Incidentally I would refer you to this chapter and its account of the New Hebridean porcocracy as a specimen of his humour as well as for the light it throws on his ideas.
Of .ill Macmillan Brown's book-- on the islands the one to which I turn with the greatest pleasure i- The Dutch East. This very entertaining book grew out of articles written for Australian and New Zealand newspapers, which he gathered into a volume in 1914. He had spent five or six months in the region in r0.12 visiting all the larger islands, primarily in search of material that might throw light on Polynesian origins, and the work i- a happy and often humorous account of the people and their institutions and social conditions, copiously illustrated.
24
Perhaps this i- the place to say thai Macmillan Brown was never content to sel oul facts and leave them to -peak for themselves. They had to form an intelligible pattern. He was accused of being dogmatic. He had no intention oi being so He was accused of forming a theory ,tnd making the facts lit it. That was never the case. When he came aero-- facts thai did not seem to lit into the accepted theories and the Pacific i- full of problems of that kind he had to find an explanation for them. His mind refused to leave facts in the air, and he was sometimes too impatient. He would a—en a- a fact what he intended to be advanced as the interpretation that appealed to him. Very often luleralisations were perfectly sound; and some of the criticism he encountered was due to the fad thai observers of the ortho- \ school had no effective reply to make when he challi their theories.
And now- I want to turn to Riallaro and Lima tiles, by Godfrey Sweven, was first printed in the United States m [897, but apparently ■ Wished until 1901, and no English edition was issued at that time, or, indeed, for more than thirty yeat no copies, other than the author's own, came to New Zealand. The original plates were preserved, however, and the English :, was printed from them in 1931. It was in this edition that Macmillan Brown announced himself as the author. Presumably he had himself decided that the American edition should not be circulated in New Zealand, and if that was the case the reason obviously was that he thought tin satire likely to be misunderstood by people who. as he often said, took themselves far too seriously and were too intolerant riticism or corrections.
The Dictionary of National Biography calls Riailai novel and describes it as satirizing New Zealand life and politic-. It is not a novel, and when Macmillan Brown wrote it he had no country particularly in mind, although one or two chapter- were certainly suggested by contemporary politics in Australia and New- Zealand. Internal evidi indicates that the early part of the satire was p main' years before it was published and some of the note- for it mavhave been written even before he came to New Zealand.
RiaUaro belongs to the satirical Utopia class. It is a kind of modern Gulliver's travels. More correctly it might be grouped with the satires and anti-Utopias provoked by Bellamy's Look ard, which, published in 1888, brought an average of a rejoinder a year for the next decade. 3 work owe- nothing to Bellamy except the inspiration to attack the extreme development of democrat y. He follows
-5
a tradition in putting hi- strange new world in the Pacific and again in disi overing an archipela in n 011 asional faint i. hoes i n, these are almost certainly accidents, lor every Utopia, however original, 1bound to have point- of resemblance to every other one. Brown certainly borrowed one idea from 7/ Ulantis, and probably other- from Bishop Hall's early seventeenth century pamphlet Mundus Alter el Idem. Erskine's Armata ha- a -hip caught m a n i am. but it i- doubtful if Brown had read it when he wrote Riallaro As foi the modern Utopias ami Utopian satires they were bound to have occasional point- oi resemblai i social and political condition- of the time in which they were written. In the early nineties, for instance, there were four German work-, all in a way rejoinder- to L I heard, and at least three American or English works of the same kind. All the writer- necessarily had the broad movements of the period in mind. Macmillan Brown was certainly writing part of Riallaro early in 18
The plan of Riallaro i- quite simple. A voyager in the South Sea- hear- persistent vague -tone- of a mysterious region away to the south-east, sealed by a ring of fog. Ships had entered it and vanished for ever. Hut tin- voyager, having steam at hi- command, determine- to solve the mystery. Within the fog ring he finds a strange archipelago, all that remain- of a continent, and he visits most of the islands in turn. Each island ha- it- peculiar people, and he learns that the inhabitant- are all exiles banished from some other island whose people had determined to rid themselves of all :- and undesirable element-.
First comes Aleofan, the island of humbugs, the home of all the virtues until the people are found out. This is Utopia in reverse. The ruling class worships truth, carries courtesy to its highest plane, makes altruism the test of every activity, has the highest standards of honour, but the practice falls far short of the profession. It takes ten chapters of sustained irony to describe the language, manners and customs, and institutions. The supreme achievement of the islanders is the organization of a State bureau of reputation. A man can go into the office and get a quotation for any kind or extent of fame. Every kind of reputation has its own price per day or month or year. Most expensive of all is the reputation for truthfulness, and then follow generosity and purity, on the principle that where all or most have a virtue it is difficult to win a reputation for special excellence in it. A journalist has to pay a hundred times more for a reputation for truthfulness than an artisan; and the highest
26
price lor reputed sobriety i- demanded of the temperance reformer. The control of fame necessarily requires the control of journalism and so journalism i- a Stale monopoly; and the direction of national thought is impossible with an uncontrolled church that, also, is a Mate business. Thus far the Aleofanian organization i- fairly logical. Why the partments of journalism and religion should be recruited from the gaols is not so obvious. Possibly the idea i> that the most accomplished liar- are to lie found among the criminal classes, but it i- not always so in real life.
From Aleofan the tourist at last escapes and. to Tirralaria. This is the home of true Socialism, of perfeel equality. Everyone is a priest and a king. There arc vast temples built by the first exiles, but now inhabited by crowds of ragged and dirty < itizens. No one has possessions worth stealing. There are no schools, be ause schools are only symbols and nurses of inequality, and the perfeel nation cannot tolerate academic snobbery. There was a time when scientists and artists were allowed to practise because heir manifest usefulness, but by an overwhelming majority the nation decided to abolish all institutions that fostered learning of any kind. It became high treason to establish a library or a school and the intellectual parasites vanished rth. 'Hie voting age was reduced until every child became a full citizi - enius, talent, profession, trad 10 form the basis of caste, and equality within nation was at last reached. Who did any work at all was a mystery, but the mystery disappeared when the tourist overed that in -pile of their professions the Tirralarians had a tribe of slaves, who lived and laboured m the crater of a vast volcano and i d at night to carry out the ing and meaner tasks of the nation. Hie wonder i- that havii le should be content to live in squalor, but at least their dirt and rag- are symbols of equality.
Forced to Bee from Tirralaria the tourist reaches Meddla, the island of reformers, whose statute book of immense size has laws to correct everything. There are prohibitions against having the hands in the pockets, against raising the little finger in drinking, the wearing of large hats, the ii-.- of expletives, the use 'if worm- for fishing, and the transof business during certain hours of the day. Unfortunately the people are so busy reforming others that they have overlooked the major vices, which are rampant. It is in the island of Wotnekst, however, that legislation reaches the summit of absurdity. This island, the most fertile in the archipelago and the richest in minerals, might
27
have beetl the mOSI opulent. The people had been thrifty and industrious, though too fond of politic-, there had been wealth} rid the harbour- had been full of shipping. But the islanders wen- not content. They wanted the millennium. They set out to abolish poverty and misery. Every new proposal was eagerly adopted to this end and politician after politician took the lead with some fresh project for the cure of all human ill-. But the ill- refused to be cured. Tariffs were imposed on foreign commerce and armies of guardians and inspectors of trade were appointed. Foreign trade slumped. Then there arose a reformer who proposed to abolish poverty by penalising capital and taking the profit- of trade and industry and all the benefit- went to the artisan and labourer. A new army of inspectors had to be appointed to administer the labour law-. Industry became waterlogged, employers went out of business, and the State was compelled to take over tin' enterprises. The labourer- learned the art of seeming to work when idling, but borrowings from abroad .at high rate- of interest disguised tin- true state of affairs. Then the agricultural and pastoral and mining industries were att Their profit- were taxed away, always to pay fresh hordes of inspectors, and the ruined owner- had perforce to hand their properties over to the State, By this time half the population was pauperized. The thrifty were next deprived of their savings in order to pay pensions to men and women who were idle enough or poor enough to appeal for assistance. A state bank and unlimited paper money did not improve matters, and in the end the people were reduced to living on roots and wild fruit-. Still they clung to their conviction that they could be made prosperous and happy by legislation. This is the condition of things when the tourist and his guide kind on the island. They are at once set upon by mobs of inspector-, each with hi- special function.
A dozen other islands attract the traveller. Foolgar is the island of snobs. Awdyoo is the isle of journalism, the most dreaded form of lunacy. On Jabberoo the people are all talkers. They have solved the audience problem by alternations of eloquence and by organizing themselves into councils, assemblies, senates, conferences, synods, mob meetings, boards, election committees, parliaments, cabinets, conclaves, chambers, convocations, congresses, consistories, diets, juntas, comitias, directories, commissions, sanhedrims, and committees, so that every man and woman can get off half a dozen speeches a day. The meetings, however, end in free fights. There are islands of diplomacy, wit, poetry, and prophecy. There is an island of spenders, who have the fixed idea that the world is divided between the earners and the spenders,
28
and the -(lender- have the diviner mission in life. Sometimes they become politician- and -late-men. and they are allowed to do what they please with the public treasury and then wear themselves thin turning a pin- into a minus. Meskeeta l- the island oi book critics, Spectralia that of spiritualists and others who believe that they alone have the privilege of communicating with the other world. Broolyi ha- media ni/ed religion.
All these islands an' the dumping grounds for the undesir ables from Limanora, whose people long ago determined to perfect themselves. Limanora has been made unapproachable, •it any rate for sailing -hip-, but the traveller at last finds a way of reaching it.
Brown is now finished with the vices and weaknesses of mankind. One might have expected the sequel to Riallaro to have been a twentieth century correction of the social and political blunders of the nineteenth. It would be a Utopia, certainly, but still human, a vision of a country purified, of a people noble and yet humble, earnest and yet light of heart, virtuous without intolerance, ruling with gentle and loving hand, devotees of truth and beauty, advanced in all things and yet having still an ideal towards which to turn their eyes and minds.
But that is not Macmillan Brown’s book. The truth is that he had no prescription to offer the diseased societies of the era. He spoke often of the evils that would flow increasingly from the ideas that had dominated the western world, and again and again prophesied that this century would be one of turmoil and trouble for the whole world. Towards the end of his life he became more and more pessimistic, foreseeing the collapse of civilization. “I am not sorry that I shall not live through it”, he said.
It is of interest, in passing, to speculate what Limanora might have been if it had been written thirty years later. Almost certainly it would have pictured a world lifted out of its miseries by an alliance of Britain and the United States, a theme on which he often discoursed.
But at the end of last century what his mind sought most persistently was an escape not from reality but from prison walls that seemed to have been raised about him by his traditions, by his training, and by the conditions of his labours. He was starting a new outlook. That is why, in Limanora, he left the world behind and let his imagination soar. You will find, if you read the book, that there is an air of detachment about it. It is like nothing else he ever wrote.
29
Limanora, The Island idfrey Swi wa- published in America in too; and was reprinted in an English edition, uniform with Riallaro, in 1927. Utopj had attraction for inquiring mind- in .all ages, but the nineteenth century out-tripped all earlier 1 1 n the production of work- of this 1 la--, and the present century ha- already reached the numb. I es Russell, in her "guide' 10 Utopias, li-t- thirty from Plato- Republic to the end of ili- ,ili century, forty-eight more to the end of the nineteenth century, and forty-four in three decades ot tin- century. She li-t- fifty-seven satirical studies, some of them parodies.
Limanora i- a pure Utopia. It i- in no sense prophetic, and it ha- no sort of message that i ould be attuned to modern condition- of life. It ha- no place for human frailties, for the weaker human element- had till been driven out of the island. Having got rid of these encumbrance- Brown had to show what the ideal state would be like. IT- e\-en expelled the priests in order to get rid of dogma, and so leave the ground ready for true religion.
It ha- been -aid that of all the race- of tin- Utopias the Limanoran- are the most highly purified and refined, the mosl spiritual. The essence oi the conception i- that they applied to the development of the individual, intellectually and spiritually, all the energies and all the thought that. on the earth, are applied to tic- development and glorification of the State. Progress i- from within. It is not by laws or by political action that mankind can be raised to a higher plane. It i- (in the individual, not on the ma--, that all study and all care must be concentrated. When they had driven out of the island the racial elements that made for evil the Limanoran-' next aim was to drive out of the individual the ruder form- of evil passion, envy, malice, hatred, jealousy, contempt, vanity. These were diseases of the immature period of life. If they did appear the patient had to be i-olated until he was purged.
One of the first of the Limanoran measures had been to abolish schools and universities, hotbeds of convention, worship of antiquity and retrogression, but they had elevated education to be the chief function of the community. And gradually, by scientific methods, they had developed not so much the power of the body as that of the mind. Their bodies were etherealized, so that as they learned to control the forces of nature and as they advanced in science and the arts they were able to take to the air, not only in machines, but by fitting wings to their own arms.
3°
The land into which the stranger bursts i- one of dazzling itv. An irridescent metal, which they call irelium. iin universal use. whether for the tine-t tissues or for the strongest structures. The home is bathed in a soft gleam. Sweet music till- the air. One seems not so much to -it into recline as to float on air. Brown lavishes a rich vocabulary on tin- theme, not merely to create an atmosphere of heavenly lUty but also to suggest a translucent world, of which the inhabitant- are little lower than the angels in body and the peer- of the angels in spirit. They ar>- fashioned of such stuff as dream- are made on.
There is a story to it. even the shadow of a love story. But the story and the adventures of tin- visitor are used only to unfold by degree- the advances of the Limanorans in all their manifestations and their activities towards the perfect state.
It is an amazing book to have been written by one whose attitude towards life was essentially practical, but clearly he felt the need of stating once for all, if only for his own peace of mind, the spiritual yearnings he had long suppressed, just a>. in Riallaro lie had had to give word- to hi- -corn of sham, pretence, humbug, and hypocrisy.
And now 1 must bring this all too sketchy survey to a 1 hope it has given you at least an idea "I Macmillan Brown's activities and the wide scope of his interests during ■ ond half of his long life. This is not a critical essay; indeed it i- intended as no more than an introduction.
In the concluding lecture of this series I propose to speak of Macmillan Brown as an educationist and particularly of the tract in which he set out his views on the direction in which education should develop in New Zealand.
31
Macmillan Brown—on Education
In preparing nils third lecture of the series 1 was sorely tempted to take a- the text some rather striking observatii that Macmillan Brown once made concerning journalism, which i- the only subject, oi course, on which 1 can sp with first-hand knowledge. And the temptation was all the stronger because journalism i- of universal interest and Brown was moved to di-< 11-- it a- perhaps the most influential of all national institutions. He firmly believed that steps should be taken to maintain it- high moral and ethical standards in tin- Dominion and that it should be a profession as jealously guarded a- medicine or the law.
"It is useless shutting our eyes to the fact that journalism has taken the place that the church used to have", he wrote. "We try to keep up the pretence that the weekly sermon ami service have their old efficacy. ... A powerful rival, impounding the unoccupied six days, ha- slowlysapped t! life. The daily paper is the preacher ami priest for six-sevenths "f the life of the community, and colours the existence a dye that not all the Sundays of the year could wash out. The editors of our local paper- are the true bishops of the diocese. They oversee and -elect the opinions and sentiments and facts that go to the making of our local life. Through their columns, and most of all through their cable columt the whole world i- preaching a homily on it- own history - a homily all the more telling for it- brevity and concentration. We may -kip the sermons- the editorial- and article-; but the cables never fail to bite their lesson into the nature. And for the fringe of social life, that almost dabble- in the mire of immorality and crime, there ir- something pertinent and minatory in the police court columns. Every free community is getting more and more dependent on the newspaper for not only it- intellectual but its ethical life. And journalism i- in the fair way to becoming the conscience and the religion of mankind."
This is a passage from the pamphlet on Modern Education, its Defects and their Remedies, published in 1908, the least known but by no means the least important of Macmillan Brown’s publications. It was in this pamphlet that he set out his considered views on the aims of education, and finally parted company, as he said, with many of the Victorian traditions. I suppose not many people will care to read now a tract written more than thirty years ago on education, because even if they are interested, as I am, in the author, they will reflect that the educational outlook has changed
3-
vastly in thirty years, and thai what Brown had to say in have little bearing on present day problem-. But that note on journalism may perhaps -how you that it was in its way an unusual kind of tract, and perhaps the best service 1 can render to the memory of my old friend and professor is to take n from the dusty shelf and tell you briefly what it i- about. The pronouncement on journalism can then fall into it- proper place.
New Zealand, the professor argued, by following the example of England, adopted an educational plan entirely unsuited to it- conditions. It over-emphasized one side of the intellectual faculties, the mnemonic, and one section of physical culture, tin- school game-. The detect- of this onesided training became strikingly apparent in the struggle mmercia] existence, for at the beginning of this century Britain found herself threatened with defeat in all direction-. and frantic efforts had to be made to follow- her rivals in scientific, technical, commercial, and military education. New Zealand, as usual, followed the lead of the Motherland, ignoring the fact that Britain was a great manufacturing country, dependent on foreign markets, whereas New Zealand's subsistence depended on the -ale of raw materials and food.
Macmillan Brown’s general argument is that New Zealand ought to have an educational scheme adapted to its own conditions. The true aim of education, he says, is the development of the whole humanity of youth so as to fit all the people to fulfil the purpose of national as well as individual life; and then he proceeds to indicate the kind of education that the Dominion should have. He starts with the home, which is the larger part of the environment of the child, and lays down the principles that ought to guide the controllers of education at each stage from the kindergarten to the university.
The State, having taken over the functions of the home in education and having reduced it to a mere annexe of the school, ought to strive to bring it back into the scheme, by bringing teachers and parents together frequently, for instance, and by establishing a psychological clinic in every district, to advise both teachers and parents. His suggestion that medical officers and trained nurses should also have their places in the educational scheme has been adopted. But it is in the education of girls that the most radical reform can be accomplished, he says. All girls should be trained for the maternal profession, not only to become efficient in household duties but to undertake the whole home training of the next generation. He would even have continuation classes for young mothers, not merely for nursing and diet.
33
but also tor the development of the intellectual and moral nature, "i hen- is no profession so vast and important . of motherhood, and we leave the training of it to mere ', he declares.
It i- in discussing moral and spiritual influenci brings journalism into the argument, to emphasize the immense influence oi newspapers for good or evil and to urge that admission to the profession of journalism should not be permitted to the untrained or the unfit. "Nol an effort has been made to insure thai it- present high ethical standard shall be maintained or to prevenl it falling into the pander to popular vices when temptation offers," he writes. "If it sinks into the mire then farewell to all ethical pr< in our community and our rai e, farewell to all our dreams of Utopias free from poverty, war and crime. Were the clergy alive to the logic ol their position they would see that this now holds as truly the keys of heaven and hell in it- hands as the church did in the middle ages. The spiritual future of the community is far more a question of the purity and morality of journalism than one of the Bible in schools."
"Journalism", he says again, "has the destiny of modern man in the hollow of its hand, as the church used to have and as the teaching profession, if properl} d and trained, should still have. So potent an occupation should not be left to the drift of circumstance, as it has been. Journalists tumble into the profession in most countries, as in New Zealand, without any special call or preparation for it." "The church, medicine, and law have taken the ul precautions thai no charlatan and no novice shall enter them. A long course of education, careful examination and ti and a period of probation guard the entrance to them, while rigid legislation for conduct and etiquette prevents any wolf that has by accidenl crept into the fold from running riot there." He suggests the establishment of a journalism course that would presumably have to be taken by any candidate for admission to the profession, and even sketches a college course that he thinks would be suitable. I do not propose to follow him in detail, interesting as the subject may be to a journalist. A few years after Macmillan Brown wrote the University did lay down a course for a Diploma in Journalism, but it scarcely meets his view because journalism remains an open profession.
His views on journalism were quite advanced. In fact he recognized that a great change had come over British journalism at the close of last century, and I ized it long before journalists in general knew what had happened. Journalism in the Victorian era was a journalism
34
new- than of opinion. It wa- a period ol uteat constitutional changes in Europe, and countries that were tending towards democracy had to educate their peoples politically. The ■ brain- of the newspaper, the great engine of popular education, were devoted to the daily discussion of political issues. The editor was selected for hi- knowledge and in standing of politics. The leader-writer- were the prince- of the profession, and the success of a journal wa- measured by the power of it- leading article-. The only other test that was applied wa- in regard to literary quality, not to new-. This conception persisted right into the presenl century and it -till conditions much of New Zealand journalism. But Brown knew that the journal of opinion had lost it- place with the passing of tin- nineteenth century and thai it was the new- and the manner of presentation of new- that influenced the thoughts of reader-. He saw also that if the State or it- rulers should ever be able to control the news they need not worry about editorial opinion-, and then he insisted that for the safety and freedom of the people there should be no toleration of restrictions or restraints on the publication of news.
I lure is another aspect of education of very general interest on which the views of Macmillan Brown are well worth recalling. It is in the matter of memory examination-. Brown was a firm advoi ate of examinations. In fact he used te that if the education system was to be rid of cramming more examination, not less, would be necessary. Bui he railed • the system that crammed the young brain with many of them worthless, instead of developing the reasoning faculties, Insistence on memory tests may have been due, for all I know, to the scarcity of book- in the early and middle ages. I can imagine no other sane reason for them, or at any rate for carrying them beyond the common rid essentia] equipment of the scholar. Macmillan Brown was particularly opposed to written examinationthai were memory tests and nothing more. These, he -aid. substituted for the old oral examination- in the nineteenth century and the man chiefly responsible was Macaulay, who made the written examination the portal to the Indian ( ivil Service.
Brown was never opposed to written examinations, for he considered them useful not only to discover the progress of pupils but as aids to teaching; but he would not have written tests preferred to oral question and answer. And he deplored the influence of the competitive examination. "The misfortune is”, he said, “that so many of the rewards of youth and early manhood have to be decided by competitive
35
examination and that exact comparison i- difficult in the faculties and element- of human nature that are the most valuable lor prai tical life physique, morality, tai t capability to manage men or affairs, reason, imagination." He regarded examination a- -o important that he would have instituted the examination of examiner- to make sure that they wen- lit to conduit the tests. Then, too. he objected to tlic system of award- and prize-. It handicap- those who are already handicapped by nature and encourages mental ity. Yet, a- he -aid. the finest talent- in the lives o! successful men have often blossomed late He argues that a proportion of prizes and scholarships ought to lie res tor the greatest progress or development made by seemingly average mind-, for Nature ha- already provided for the success of precocity and showy power-, without the stimulus of artificial reward-
Brown was writing more than a decade after he gave up teaching, and 1 remember that when he made hi- views public it was remarked that he seemed to have abandoned many of the principles that had governed his teaching. But the truth is that when he wa- teaching he had to conform to the condition- of the education system, including the university, and that he held unorthodox views even in 1895. [ remember that one public address of hi- greatly surprised and even offended -nine persons prominent in the world of education, and one of them remarked that perhaps it wa- a- well that he was retiring. In some respects he anticipated by a quarter of a century the revolutionary idea- of Huxley and Hogben and their associates in what i- sometimes called the rationalising movement. He used to talk, for instance, of the ne of ridding the school syllabus of all the lumber it carried. It still carric- a lot of lumber, by the way, with the irrational spelling of the English language and the complicated weights and measures, on the learning of which children are compelled to spend, actually to waste, main- precious hour-. He adjured me. many time-, to have life and the preparation for life always in mind in anything I wrote about education.
in iimici in ai i \ i wiulc iiiimiii iuui .until. In this pamphlet there are many wist- observations <m the illicit- and wrong tendencies of education. Here i- one mi the mi-take that was made in copying in New / the English primary school system: "The English system was instituted in that period of the nineteenth century when commerce seemed to hold the destinies of the nation in its hand- and promise the millennium of peace within a few generations. The result was that it was intended to raise clerks and merchants. Arithmetic and writing filled the whole scheme of the teacher, after he had taught his pupils
36
the elements of reading. This ideal was adopted bodily in the New Zealand elementary schools along with the duodecimal system which hampers British commerce. And yet, foi more than a generation, we have been wondering why all the boys have made for clerkship- and eschewed the pursuit-of tile farm and the factory. ... It w.i- right enough for England. .... But for a new- country like New Zealand, far from markets, with but small towns, and all her existence dependent on primary industries, no educational ideal could have been more disastrous."
The whole of tin- chapter on the early stages of education i- worthy of study, because although there have been some notable improvements the supremacy of commercial subjects and method- in the primary schools i- -till pronounced. Brown considered that all teaching in the primary stages had been influenced by the teaching of arithmetic, so that every subject was reduced a- far a- possible to a series of that could be isolated and memorized and made the subject of precise examination. "The result", he says, "was a Sahara of education as the human mind could He realized how difficult effective reform would be. He would have attracted the best talent- to the teaching ;sion by adequate salaries and given the teacher- full levelop originality and character. Particularly he thought it imperative to check the drift of the rural population to the towns. He foresaw quite clearly the social tendencies of the Dominion and believed they could be corrected in the schools and by some plan of helping pupil- when they left school to h\ their careers, so that there should be fewer failure-.
I have to deal with a good many applicants for jobs in the course of a year, and no doubt some of the brightest scholars turn towards journalism as a career; but the older I get the stronger grows the conviction that schooling, at any rate in the immediate post-primary stage, stands in need of radical reform. And in particular what we need in the youth of New Zealand is at least the beginning of a sense of resoonsibilitv
I know that Macmillan Brown had the same opinion. He used to say that if teachers, instead of teaching facts, were to teach children how to educate themselves it would be immensely better for the nation. The Scots were a small people, he would say, but they achieved a success out of all proportion to their numbers and he attributed the success to the quality of the Scottish education. He has an interesting note on the subject in this tract. “What has given the Scot abroad his success in all communities and spheres”, he writes,
37
"i- hi- adaptability to the condition- he ha- to meet; and nothing could haw given him thi- a- a universal quality but his common-school education. Hi- schoolmasters at developing hi- whole nature and making him fit to emergencies without appeal to special advantages of wealth, caste or influence; the democrats spirit of the people made the school a miniature of the struggle for life in the world; all started fair and had the same condition-; and the best survived; tin- strenuous and equal competition evolved the adaptability that stood by them well when pitted against the wit- of other nation- and race-. There i- an uneasy feeling that the English common school system and the colonial systems that have been modelled on it have egregiously failed in thi- respect."
I would like to follow .Macmillan Brown through his comments on the secondary schools, but it i- scarcely sary because the idea- he e.v ir the most pari commonplace now. though the educational world i> so conservative that reform- which are universally agreed to be necessary have -till to be carried mo. effed lie- truth is that while the controller- of education are idy to reform the administration they approach the reform of the syllabus with extraordinary trepidation.
And there i- one comment of my own that I want to make in thi- connection. It i- that judging by results a great deal of the time -pent in the secondary schools i- time wasted, and the Dominion i- wasting time and money giving postprimary education or the wrong sort of post-primary edui ation to too many scholars. The curriculum of the secondary schools ha- been changed greatly since Brown wrote, but my point is that hundred- of pupil- are receiving no benefit from the time and money and teaching energy expended on them. There are children who (an absorb abstract ideas readily. but for the majority the i urriculum ought to be entirely practical.
Fortunately in this lecture I am under no obligation to keep to the text, but I am with Macmillan Brown in pleading that mathematics and the sciences ought to be vitalized. It occurs to few adults that most of politics can be stated in terms of arithmetic. And I am sure that no schoolboy ever realizes that the energy he spends playing football has to come out of the earth. A football match costs just so much in wheat, meat, eggs, and milk. A few arithmetical problems involving such calculations, for which the material figures could easily be provided, would give the schoolboy the beginnings of a scientific approach to life. The idea may seem to be fantastic to some of you, but it is not really so.
|8
Science i- surely not so remote from life that it has i" be taught .1- a separate subject or separate subjects and nol allowed to intrude into other subjects. 1 cannot understand why the sciences should be taught in closed compartments, and this applies to the university college- a- well a- to the secondary schools. Read the condition- of the entrance scholarships so far a- the sciences are concerned and you will find that the scholar can take Chemistry or Home Science, Electricity, Heat and bight. Botany or Zoology, and he can win a maximum of 300 mark- in any ol these scien compared with 600 for Latin or 400 for French or German. He cannot earn even 100 mark- for a knowledge of the history of scientific progre-- or for general scientific know ledge. And if he happen- to take Zoology what he i- required to know i> not anything about hi- own body and it- structure and function-, but a practical knowledge of the structure of Amoeba. Hydra, or Obelia, the earthworm, weta or cockroach, frog or rabbit, the lite history of a moth, hut not of a human being. This i- not in one of the islands of Maemillan Brown's imaginative archipelago, mark you, but in New Zealand.
You do not need to tell me that the University colleges are bound to specialize. I know that is so. I know that courses must be laid down as a preparation for professions and that the teaching must be technical. But my point is this, that a general knowledge of science is surely one of the essential elements of a modern culture and that neither in the schools nor in the University colleges can a pupil or student acquire even the smatterings of a general scientific knowledge. The truth is that the teachers of science themselves are, and under existing conditions have to be, narrow, in the sense that unless they are specialists they have no chance of being employed as teachers. But do not ask me to believe that this is a sane system in a modern university. Is there one secondary school in New Zealand that gives the pupils any general knowledge of the progress of science? I doubt it. If I might make a suggestion it is that a new subject for the degree of B.A., and B.Sc. for that matter, might be the history of science, and perhaps an outline might even be worth 300 marks in the entrance scholarship examination.
When he came to discuss university education Maemillan Brown had to repudiate the principles and the methods he had adopted in his own teai hing career, but in truth he had done that years before and he went ahead boldly. "Individuality", he write-, should be the keynote of this as of all other parts of the education system, how- to shelter and develop every new and useful variant in faculty, talent, character,
39
• oid idea. I he differeni e here i- that the aim should be si and easily attained The differentiation for life < begun in earnest. The university contain- different p schools that train for the varied -killed calling- of the nation. In fact, tin- i- taken a- it- distinction from the secondary But if this were all. there would be no inherent -itv for bringing them together into one institution. It i- a tradition from the period of infancy of modern science; then. if printing had made book- cheaper it had not made them cheap enough to pa-- out of the hand- of the feu-; the function ol the university was, therefore, the communication of all available knowledge, and a- the professions differentiated, all available knowledge in each sphere. The professor or lecturer was supposed to traverse the whole of hi- subject in his course.
"And this ideal -till obstructs the evolution of universities, by turning their -tali- into coaches that cover every year the same barren ground, even though there are (heap textbook- available to perform the same duties more thoroughly. I he habit i- enough to fossilize the most energetic mind in creation. And we have -ecu in the old universities men lecturing who had been at tin- treadmill for half a century, beyond all possibility of being awakened from their hypnotic and hypnotizing sleep. Nay, the universities of the newer land- are manufacturing similar museum specimens. And the generation- of unfortunate students pass through their class-rooms as somnolent and as untouched by the growing life outside as their teacher-, with only now- and then a Rip Van Winkle look in their eyes a- some echo from it seems about to awaken them. A professoriate of this sort ha- solved the problem how to simulate life while dead."
"Now even in the separate profession or science or subject fort to cover the whole ground is certain to destroy the vitality of the teacher," he says again. "Yet this is the aim of much of the work in universities, as one can see by the manuals still publishing. Specialization and intensive treatment are clearly indicated even on a superficial view of universities. But the old lecturing system, meant to give an ab-tract of what is known on the subject, -till persists and is taken as the differentiation of the university from the secondary school. 111-spelt, ill-written, undecipherable notebook- to be feverishly crammed before the examination are the chief result."
The true difference between the secondary school and the university, he urged, should be in research. The universities of the Old Country had had to cover secondary education as well as the advance of learning and the New- Zc.il.uhl
4°
colleges had been modelled on them. What the) should be doing i- to teach students how to find out lor themselves. "Wh.u i- the use", he asks, "of selecting the iine-i intellects and detaining them, after ,1 do/en years' training, for three or more year-' over-education if it 1- nol 10 set them on the unsolved problems of our country. . . . Here we are frittering away the best talent the country i- able to produce on the further acquisition of a thousand times repeated knowledge."
In particular, university work in New Zealand ought to attack the problem- of New Zealand, especially the primary industi ourse, he said, there are certain professions that are always with us like the poor, teaching, law, medicine, and engineering, but New Zealand had it- special industries, which he thought should be able to absorb all tin- graduates it produced. "It i- one of the surest signs of the education of a country being out of relation to it- work", he says, "that the demand for it- graduate- should ever be in the rear of the supply." You know that he gave practical expression to his views on tin- question when he endowed the University scholarships in agriculture.
it i- a little curious that although lie wa- keen about the education of journalists he had nothing to sav in the pamphlet about the education of legislators. Perhaps he thought that the journalists might be efficient teacher-. The truth i- that he had no faith in the democracies or their parliament- of uninstructed men because, a- he used to say, the great ma-- of voters wa- swayed by feeling and not by mind. But if the democracies could lie saved it would lie by their newspapers and their universities, and that is why he insisted strongly on the adequate education of journalists. He hoped that universities would ultimately do more for the peace of the world than all the parliament-. This wa- a subject on which he spoke in his address to the Senate in 1933. He was arguing that competition was Nature's method to ure progre--.
No two individuals were born alike and mankind had forged ahead by making the differentiation deliberate. If only acquired -kill and abilities and virtues could be made hereditary progress would be lightning swift. Universities • he nearest approach to tin- ideal. They -bared knowledge and passed it on. He had an idea, he said, that universities would displace parliament- in unifying the world. Parliaments represented the opinion- of unregulated, unscientifically thinking masses, lacking foresight and practical wisdom. can never lead to the rational unification of mankind." he declared, "such a unification as would -weep away ail barrier- between the communities of the world and sei un-
4"
the peaceful intercourse oi all nation-. With the universities and t Inn graduates forming the i onstituencies mankind might make some approach to a world parliament, or at least a conference in to indicate sanely the condition- that should belong to a federation of the world." What wa- runnii In- mind was that if universities were built on broader foundations than the specialization that prevailed they would attract the ablest and most developed mind- and that the contact of their wi-e men would gradually bring whole nation- closer together. It wa- a dream, oi course, tar from fulfilment, but he could see no better path to world progress. "The universal suffrage parliaments of to-day will hav be jettisoned if the world i- to attain to more than the commonplace," he -aid, characteristically. Hut I wonder if he would repeat the sentiment, now. when the universal suffrage parliaments are the only defender- of the liberty that Macmillan Brown himself so often declared to be the most priceless of all possessions.
Brown took lon- view-. He knew that educational reform was at best a -low process, and indeed thought it wise that it should not be hurried. But there wa- no danger of haste, he said, because of all institutions the educational on,.- we re the most conservative. No business could flourish if it were ducted on -uch conservative line-. The leaders in education carried on what they had learned in the schools and the whole system, especially in England, was -till governed in the main by tradition- that had had their origin in the middle ages.
Of all the reforms needed the most urgent and the most radical he believed to be in the education of girls. “The State’’, he says in the pamphlet, “should lavish all its possible wealth on the training of its girls, as holding its fate in their hands. No duty is of such import to it as the education of the future mothers of its citizens. If their health is impaired and their physique undeveloped their sons and daughters will be hardy only by accident. If their morale is low and their character feeble then all the dogmatic teaching of the school, the church, and the journals will avail but little. If they know little of the physiology and psychology of childhood fewer of the children will reach manhood and womanhood and still fewer will reach it without seeds of disease or enfeeblement in the mental, moral or physical constitution.”
Next to tin- he placed the necessity for adjusting education ,11 all stages to the needs of the nation, especially to its lomic needs. He was never one to disparage material wraith, though he never confused national prosperity with national happiness. Wealth, he used to say, made leisure
4*
possible, and when a nation had wealth and leisure it turned sooner or later to the art- which added grace to life. A nation should give it- education system a definite direction dictated by it- own conditions of life and should not merely reproduce the systems of older countries. You will remember that he elaborated this theme in one of his addresses a- Chancellor of the University, that of [925, when he offered £2OOO to establish post-graduate research scholarships in agriculture. Agriculture, he said, was crying out to the universit} to aid it in solving it;- problem-. A good deal ha- been done since then to develop the scientific study of agricultural and pastoral problem-, but I am anxious that you should not forget Macmillan Brown'- foresight in this matter and his 1 ersistent advocacy of research. In hi- E925 speech he appealed to those who had made big money out of the land to do something for the improvement of farming in general, and to subsidize research; but the appeal ha- fallen for the most part on deaf ears.
Macmillan Brown’s public addresses on education questions are full of wise observations, and I should have been glad to extend this lecture to include summaries of them. His plea for the biological interpretation of history, for instance, and the argument that education in New Zealand should be kept in closest touch with developments in older countries are both important. Unfortunately the texts of these statements of his are not now available and the published summaries do them less than justice. In his 1934 address, one of the last he delivered, he set out his views on examinations, coming in the end to a compromise that I think is quite sound. His considered opinion was that examinations should be partly oral to allow the candidate to be tested by a variety of questions and to permit a fair judgment of his intellectual measure and partly written, with the same set of questions fnr all in ant' crrcxAe*
In the concluding chapter of his tract he praises some features of the American university system and elaborates the proposition that the university should be brought into closer relationship with the main industries of its district. Some progress has since been made in this direction in Canterbury, as you know. He approved, too, of the American practice of having a president with almost dictatorial powers at the head of the university; and he mentions, in passing, the proposition that all prizes and scholarships should be regarded as loans, to be paid back conscientiously with compound interest when the scholars go out into the world.
I have done less than justice to this most interesting tract. The reason why it was chosen as the subject of this
43
lei tin i indi< ate how deeply and ho\ tl\ Macmillan Brown pondered the matter of education in I country. I said in the openi re that when Into New Zealand he thought that in a I would 1h- bai I: in i But the longer he stayed the u rbed he became in the problem- of life in a ure i onvinced he was that hj the opportunity foi 'I high value. When he gave up red that he could not imagine himself wanting to live in any other country, and he fervent! that in it> eagerness t" break the i hains of social and polit tradition New Zealand might break away, also, fron tradition. It was in his farewell address early in if: that the first indication of his cl fli~ students had subscribed for a literary prize. "I wish someone could establish a prize for scien original discovery," he said. "I - a time when I thought English was the most important of all - but now I see that paramount.'' This opinion you have seen, tinged everything he hj. in after years.
It has been a great privilege to me to pay this p tribute to Macmillan Brown's memory. All I I I owe tn the education system of New Zealand, to the teaching not only of Macmillan Brown himself, bul teachers whom he had taught. He was a remarkable many-sided man, one of the really outstanding < he had an influence that reached into every adopted country. He lived a full life, for he was never and when his long and many days closed he could rest conti for if any man had served New Zealand well it was surely | lohn Macmillan Brown.
PRINTED BY WHITCOMBE & TOMBS LIMITED C8IS5
Permanent link to this item
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/books/ALMA1941-9917502723502836-John-Macmillan-Brown-lectures---
Bibliographic details
APA: Henderson, A. G. (Alexander Gunn). (1941). John Macmillan Brown lectures : 1941. Whitcombe & Tombs.
Chicago: Henderson, A. G. (Alexander Gunn). John Macmillan Brown lectures : 1941. Christchurch, N.Z.: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1941.
MLA: Henderson, A. G. (Alexander Gunn). John Macmillan Brown lectures : 1941. Whitcombe & Tombs, 1941.
Word Count
18,667
John Macmillan Brown lectures : 1941 Henderson, A. G. (Alexander Gunn), Whitcombe & Tombs, Christchurch, N.Z., 1941
Using This Item
Out of copyright (New Zealand)
To the best of the National Library of New Zealand’s knowledge, under New Zealand law, copyright in this book has expired.
You can copy this item, share it, and post it on a blog or website. It can be modified, remixed and built upon. It can be used commercially. If reproducing this item, it is helpful to include the source.
For further information please refer to the Copyright guide.
Log in