NOTES AND COMMENTS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 58, Issue 192, 27 May 1938, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

“ GOTT MIT UNS." “There is a higher destination of which we are tools,”' declared Herr Hitler in his final speech in the Austrian plebiscite campaign. “When Herr Schuschnigg broke his word, I knew instantaneously that this was the call of Providence. What happened in the following three days was nothing but the execution of the will of this Providence. In three days the Lord defeated them, and I was granted the great grace to lead my country back on the very day of treason. I want to thank only Him who showed me the way to lead my home into the Reich. May every German in humiliation bow before the Almighty who performed a miracle.” WORLD PERSPECTIVE. There are human or sub-human remains which go back probably 100,000,000 years, and there are remains of human settlements, palaeolithic and neolithic, probably not less than 30,000 years old, writes Mr J. A. Spender in the “Yorkshire Observer.” Bar cosmic such as collisions with stars from the outer universe, astronomy seems to promise an almost unlimited future for life on the earth. It used to be supposed that life would be cut short by periodic glacial periods and fresh starts be necessary as they passed. But this seems to be by no means a necessary belief. The changes of climate would he very slow and modern man would have all sorts of means of adapting himself to their changes and of discovering new climates. There is no reason to suppose that the return of the ice would break the continuity of life as it is supposed to have done in the previous Ice Ages. So, instead of regarding the 7000 or 8000 years of imperfectly recorded history as the chief, or even a considerable part of the life of man on the earth, I am at liberty to think of it as merely an experimental beginning oi a process which will have infinite extension ill time. The world, on this assurrtption, is still in its early infancy, and its troubles are not signs of decreptitude but of infantile restlessness and stretching of limbs. I am convinced that optimism requires a timescale which gives the world room to grow out of its infirmities and recovei from its back-slidings, and science seems to suggest that it will have this and abundance of it,