NOTES AND COMMENTS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 58, Issue 85, 20 January 1938, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

THE ENGLISH. The English, observes Mr J. S Collis in his book, “An Irishman’s England,’’ have no Church, in the full meaning of the word. Deprived, therefore, of the undiluted religious sense, and devoid of the capacity to philosophise absolutes, they have, nevertheless, evolved an ethical behaviour of immense potency. They do not enjoy life, but they contrive to make it fair. Though they lack the rudimentary ingredients of community, they are still the greatest organisers in the world. They are toneless, minimising, yet they breed natural mystics and sublime poets. Conscientiously educated, they despise culture, starving their best or original minds, while lavishly endowing those of average content but high vitality, who hit the mean between land and "water. Their freedom, ancient and tough-fibred,’ genuinely prized, angrily defended against any sort of dictatorship, is not, however, a daily or consuming passion—rather, the two-handed engine at the door, waiting in reserve. It is concluded, and some of Mr Collis’ predecessors have subscribed to it, that the Englishman is an individual eminently sincere, trained by age 9 of public discussion to almost boundless tolerance, to couple hatred with the sins of .heresy and schism, and by long ease of life, perhaps, to rank play at least as high as work, and used quite frankly to honour success

IDEAS THAT WIN WARS. The whole thing comes clown to this —that wars are won, not by weapons, but by ideas, and the people who win them are those that produce, accept borrow, or steal ideas, but at any rate have them, writes the “Manchester Guardian” in discussing British Army policy. It was not tanks that did so much to win the war, but the idea that made the tank; it was not masses of machine-guns that directed the course of the war, but fhe idea that machine-guns ought to be multiplied beyond anything formerly conceived. The old story that is taught to school children about the Romans and the Carthaginians has a terrible truth in it. The Carthaginians were sailors and the Romans were landlubbers, but the Romans dropped spikes from their ships to those of the Carthaginians, locked the ships together, provided themselves with a “land” battle, and won hands down. Our soldiers have to face tremendous problems; whether, should there unhappily be another war, a British army of millions is to go abroad again or not, what another war would be like, and, since it surely will not be like the last f how it is to be won. That is to say, there must be energy, freshness of mind and initiative rather than text-books and tradition. If the Secretary of State for War, Mr HoreBelisha, is on this track, he will have public support enough to compensate him for any merely professional criticisms.