NOTES AND COMMENTS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 58, Issue 34, 19 November 1937, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

ECONOMIC ACTION FOR PEACE. Addressing the League of Nations Committee on economic problems, Mr Stanley Bruce, High Commissioner of .Australia, declared that the world was waiting for true leadership on the economic problems, which touched the welfare of every citizen and every nation. The promotion of international economic co-operation would do much, he added, to restore the prestige of the League. Mr Bruce contrasted the world’s abundant production with the poverty which prevailed in even the richest countries. This condition led to social unrest, and unless the causes were removed it would lead to appalling upheavals which would destroy the civilisation they knew.

YOUTH PLAYING ITS PART.

In many nations to-day youth is alive, vital, determined and enormously eager and anxious to play its part in the world, says “Judge.” German youth seems dazzled by Hitler and his Nazi movement; it has gotten the idea that it was through Hitler that German youth had at last a chance to participate in life. So in Italy, where II Duce’s early policy of enrolling youth in the Fascist movement has caa’ried them into key positions in the State. In Russia there is a new religion of irrelation, a strange Soviet frenzy, but youth is gazing star-eyed upon it; and whatever one may feel about the terrible blood purges of the past year, youth has moved in to fill the gaps. Youth is on the march in China to defend the republican principle from the vigorous attack of nationalist Japan, itself enlisting the flower of its youth to make China a vassal state. Youth is demonstrating a new faith in the democracies of Western Europe, in France and England and in the Scandinavian countries, where one finds vigorous and definite attachments and earnest, eager young men and women willing to invest their lives serving them. All this seems enormously important. It never was any use 'to look with blase eyes upon an empty world. If people but have eyes to see and ears to hear, the world never is without savour or significance. Furthermore, there never has been a time in our history when energy, intelligence, imagination and courage are niore needed and can do youth and the world more good, than to-day.