WORLD POLITICAL PROBLEMS

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28890, 9 May 1959, Page 11

WORLD POLITICAL PROBLEMS

“Peoples Can’t Turn To Select Few”

(New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, May 8.

In politics, as distinct from science, peoples of the world today could not turn over their problems to a select few, the American ambassador (Mr Francis H. Russell) said at the Victoria University of Wellington graduation ceremony tonight.

Imaginative and intelligent political leaders have to have support from an imaginative and intelligent body politic, he said. Today, when one half of the world’s 500 million children between five and 14 were receiving primary school education and only one in 10 could look forward to secondary education, three things seemed necessary. “First, for a generation or more the relatively small, intensively educated portion of the earth’s people must bear a larger than average responsibility for finding solutions to the complex world problems. “Second, they must deal with those problems in such a way that there will be a constant strengthening of the democratic process.

“Third, there must be generous assistance in helping the retarded areas to break the vicious circle of limited economic resources and low levels of education.

“This is a challenge. Whether we can meet it is the key question of our time and may indeed be the key question of all human history.”