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Press, Volume LIX, Issue 17922, 16 November 1923, Page 8

London is still divided in its opini.-m on the advantages and disadvantages of traffic refuges. Following on a recent accident a Coroner for Westminster urged the provision of far more of these safety zones —a dozen more in a single square —while admitting that "itis now almost safe to cross Trafalgar square." But he was met with the objection from motorists that a refuge may provide safety for one pedestrian and imperil the lives of a whole carload of faster travellers. One thing, however, he said which was not disputed, and which can be repeated with advantage here: motorists should make more use of their 'brakes and less of their hooters. In any case they should not depend on their hooters alone to avert accidents. Though it is impossible to argue with an advancing car, and win, the pedestrian often docs not hear the horn, or hears two horns from opposite directions, or misjudges a car's speed, or simply loses his head and zig-zags into danger. Nor, although this is the age of petrol rather than of the leisurely liberty of the subject, can the motorist lay any claim to complete sway over country roads. No pedestrian should be' expected to "duck and run" when he hears a hoot from a car—whether he is strolling through the Buller Gorge or crossing Cathedral square.

What, and who, is an English gentleman? A Japanese naval commander asked the headmaster of Eton recently, and the master could not answer; or if he did answer something, his words were not a definition. The best he could do was to explain that there is no definition, and no standard even that could be accurately fixed in words. "I limited myself," he said afterwards, "to eaying that in Public Schools we try to give boys a sense of the right use of freedom, and to encourage them to rule one another." But he had to add that this was not done by precept so much as by example, and that proper relations between boy and master are an essential if it is to be done at all. Then what the Japanese wanted was not a boy, but a man —a man of the type called, and of course worthy to be called, gentleman: for the boy does not always make the man. Was Byron made a gentleman at Harrow? If he was, what did Eton do to Shelley? And if there is a group wide enough to contain those two opposites, where would De Quincey goP It is not so reported, but the impression is given that the Japanese went away "exceedingly sorrowful"—not because English gentlemen. do not exist, hut because they cannot explain themselves when they do.

On the fifth of last month the "Lancet" completed its hundredth year. In uW that long space it has had only five <*)itors, and if it has never set out to make money, it will probably growrich •by contagion now that its owners (since 1920) are Messrs Hodder and Stotighton. Fortunately, however, the new proprietors, like the new proprjgtors af "The Times," regard their poseession as something oj a trust, and in fchioe years have announced no "drastic improvements." The "Lancet" has Deep, and will continue to be, the I "Doctors' Mirror" first, and a publication for laymen only incidentally. Its function is to fight disease with the I pen, or with printer's ink, and the measure of its success will be best appreciated when we recall that it was Lister's organ when he launched his famous attack on septic surgery. So, /too, it is the "Lancet" we must thank for the present methods of hospital training, for improved medical education and the suppresion of quacks, and for our numerous pure 'food Acts—to mention one or two only of its successful attacks on the methods of the dark ages. It is difficult, however, to say whether it is stimulating or depressing that two of the unsuccessful attempts of its founder and first editor I were an organised campaign against tuberculosis, and an enquiry into the ' treatment of insanity.