VOICE OF THE NATIONS

Dominion, Volume 16, Issue 154, 17 March 1923, Page 11

VOICE OF THE NATIONS

SAYINGS AND WRITINGS :: :: OF THE TIMES ::

A Fair Question. “How is it possible for women to understand politics when they have to depend almost entirely on their husbands for their political education?” —“Columbia Record.” “Progress.”

“There is no warrant in the Gospels for the hope of progress, in the sense of a slow and gradual advance and amelioration through the operations of evolutionary forces, or the extension of men’s dominion over nature, or the spread of knowledge, or the growth of ‘sweeter manners, purer laws.’ The idea of ‘Progress’ that runs through the whole teaching of Jesus is that of the transformation of humanity through the ’activity of the mighty saving energies of God in response to human faith.” —Dr. H. Maldwyn Hughes, Sn his Fernley lecture on “The Kingdom and its Hope of Progress.”

Human Solidarity and Bad Form. “The war, with its economic consequences, which even the man in the street is now beginning to visualise, has, after all, been a huge object-lesson. It has made us realise as never before tho fundamental bedrock fact of human solidarity; and with every fresh realisation of this, our sense of individual responsibility has grown. There are to me many signs—slight perhaps, but indubitable—that irresponsibility and callous egotism of whatever type, and whether in the sphere of industry, politics or society, will sooner or later be considered , bad form. The weight of public opinion and even of social ostracism will be flung into the scale against the dictates of sheer selfishness.”—Mr. Seebohn Rowntree. The Sheltered Life.

“Let a puppy eat the soap in the bathroom or chew a newlv-blacked boot. He chews and chuckles until, by and by, be finds out that blackinsand old Brown Windsor make Ihim very sick; so he argues that soap and boots are not wholesome. Any old dog about the house will soon show him the unwisdom of hiting big dog’s ears. Being young, he remembers and goes abroad, at six months, a well-mannered little beast with a. chastened appetite. If he had been kept awav from boots, and soap, and big dogs till he came to the trinity full-grown and with developed teeth, consider how fearfully sick and thrashed he would be! Apply that nqtion to the ‘sheltered life,’ and see how it works. It does not sound pretty, but it is the better of tivo evils.”—From “A Kipling Anthology: Prose.” A Hint for the Press.

“Lest it be considered a contradiction in terms to mention literature and the newspapers in the same breath, we lhasten to say that we believe that there .is no agency with wider possibilities for raising the standard of popular taste than the newspaper, and that the newspaper is beginning to see its missionary opportunity. It takes no more room to print the good than the bad, and weeding out the indifferent, which half of the feature writing that fills their pages is. would release space for the story, the essay, or the poem that may be the entering wedge to a liberal education. The newspapers are not yet fully aroused to the strategic position they hold as potential forces for the elevation of literary standards. Theirs can be an influence more powerful than that of the school room, for it js longer continued, more steady, and plays upon maturer minds.”—“Literary Review.”

To the Multitude for Guidance, “Let us leave off for the moment seeking for great inspirations among dominant leaders and uttering complaints because these leaders are not present, and the inspiration is denied. Go down to the mass of common people. . . . You will find in every town and city, and almost in every village, those among them who ere directing their life towards non-material ideas, and who cherish some vision of a world where the values between things temporal and things eternal are different from that of men’s daily accepted standard. They belong to divers religions, many of which condemn each other, or are astonished at each other; and they derive the inner spings of a life which is more concerned with the love. . of God and man, realised in action, than with the determination of ‘getting on and acquiring great possessions.’ | They are the ‘remnant’ of which a great’ writer has spoken. And by that remnant the world may yet be saved.” —C. F. G. Masterman. The Mess In Mesnot,

“The British people is being required to maintrifi a King whose rule is regarded with indifference or else with positive hostility by the Arabs It has to provide aeroplanes to collect, his taxes by bombing the inhabitants —a. process which is hardly likely to make us loved. Though for the time being there is relative peace. The being there is relative per/?e, new troubles may be expected at any moment. The regime of King Feisal can only be buttressed up by further heavy expenditure, including loans of ‘at least £1,000,000 a year.’ Now, it is necessary to say once and for all that the British nation has not got the money for this. No British interest is served by squandering cash in Mesopotamia, and at the same time incurring the risk of new and serious wars.” —London “Daily Mail.” A Result of Moral Panic.

“Why, when we had the power to make a good treaty, did we make a bad one? Because the persons managing affairs —our newspapers and so forth —instead of trying to recall the public to sense of reality, added to the panic. We fought the Germans because we believed that the German notion of what was right and wrong was impossible, barbaric, and savage. Yet the reason most commonly given for our making the kind of peace we did make was that it was the kind of peace the Germans themselves would havejnade. The reason commonly given now by those who supported the present action of the French was that it was what the Germans would have done. Yet we fought tliq Gormans because the kind of peace they would have made would have been a savage and impossible peace, and we were perhaps entering on a new war today because of the action we took in a moment of moral panic.”—Mr. Norman Angell.

An Unrealised Peril. “Very few persons seem to grasp what tremendous and strange events are happening in the Eastern world. Tino, to our certain knowledge, did not believe in his own Asiatic adventures. He knew that he had either to lose his crown or mislead a deluded people still further. What has happened in the last few years is an annihilation in Asia Minor of Christianity, both Greek and Armenian. They survived the Arab conquests after Mohammed more than a thousand years ago and the Turkish conquest later. Doom was finally accomplished under our late Coalition hypnotised inexplicably (by the Athenian infatuation which has lea the Greeks themselves to destruction. —London “Observer.” The Peopling of Canada. “Immigration into Canada has practically oeased. Such is the surprising situation that has developed in spite of the fact that just across the ocean, a week’s voyage distant, are the tens of millions of hungry, discontented men and women. Broadly, Canada admits two classes of immigrants: (a) farmworkers; (b) domestic servants. Generally speaking, it is the declared policj of the Government and of the nation that no classes other than thesei two are wanted in Canada at the present time. Labour unions are insistent that there is no need at present for artisans or town-dwellers generally, and in this for the time being, with the bogey of unemployment threatening, the nation as a whole is disposed to agree.”—“Manchester Guardian.” A Breeding Ground For Revolution. “We shall never get the world to live on some agreed basis without some fundamental agreement on the meaning of life, some loyalty to a supreme spiritual power. Hence "tlie need, for a united Church. The great issues are sharpening day by day. They are forcing us, however to look at the position. There are two great economic ideals now fighting for possession of the world. One is the individualist, and the other the collectivist. Have they got to fight it out? If they do there will be nothing left when either side has won. Unless there is some faith which can take what is good on both sides, reconcile them, correct them, govern them, give them driving power, there is gping to be a perpetual struggle for domination, and domination will breed revolution.” —Dr. W. E. Orchard.

Music the Magician. “The best kind of social life is that which makes people happier. Musio can do this, for it is the one perfect medium for this dream of humanity. This is the quality of music that makes it so precious to us: ‘lt builds for us an. immaterial world, not made of objects or theories or dogmas or philosophies, but of pure spirit, a means of escape from the thraldom of every day.’ Only good music can do this. By that I mean the classics and the works of our best modern composers. All music should be elevating, and for that reason I unhesitatingly condemn those works which appeal to the lower passions. There should not be too much of the musical revue or jazz type, although many business men who are not musical find much satisfaction in listening, to lighter compositions. In fact, it is a judicious mixture of the “light” and the classical that will achieve the best influence.”—Sir Dan Godfrey, the famous conductor of the Bournemouth Orchestra.

The Voice of Bulgaria. “We demand that the formal promise made to us in the Treaty of Neuilly that freedom of transit should be granted to us unconditional and absolute in the direction of the Aegean ■ Sea should be carried out. We need a harbour and the possession of a strip of land connecting our country to the Aegean, this strip to include the railway line from Mustapha Pasha on I our frontier down to Dedeagatch, the , position of the harbour—for it will ; have to be built, since Dedeagatch has ; no harbour —being immaterial to us so | long as it is in the immediate vicinity of the railway line—between Dedeagatch and Makiri. Obviously liberty of transit implies sovereignty of the | line along which tins liberty is assumed to exist, and we could not agree T to Greece being left in charge of it. L This demand is perfectly legitimate. The district of Dedeagatch is ethnically and economically ours, and there is no question that is of so vital a concern to our future as a nation, and, consequently, while all our other hopes have failed us we cling to it as to our - last chance of achieving anything na- ' tionally .... for, frankly, I cannot conceive what will happen or not happen in Bulgaria if it is not granted : to us.” —M. Tchanokoff, of Bulgaria, .. on the Aegean question.

Mussolini and the Workers.' “I must assure you that the Government over which I have the honour to preside never intended following an anti-Labour policy. I, on the contrary, wish to express my esteem for labourers who create no embarrassment for Governments and who have abolished strikes. Our labourers have redeemed themselves and no longer believe in Asiatic Utopias imported from Russia. They believe in themselves and their work. They believe in the possibility, which I consider a certainty, of a great, prosperous, and free Italian nation. lam not speaking without careful reflection. After two months of government I tell you that if the Fascist! revolution had been delayed for another few months, nay, perhaps another few weeks, Italy would to-day be in chaos. What we are now doing is trying to make up for blunders of the past. We are delivering citizens front the burden of laws which were the fruit of an insipid demagogy. We are delivering our State from superstructures that suffocate it, and from economic undertakings for which it is unfitted. We are labouring to balance our State Budget, which signifies restoring the value of our lire and occupying a position deserving respect and esteem among the. nations, and in reconstituted Italy it is Labour, manual labour as well as intellectual labour, that will have the first place.” —Signor Mussolini, Premier of Italy, to a workers’ deputation.