VOICES of the NATION

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 100, 22 January 1927, Page 17

VOICES of the NATION

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

Kid Gloves for China. “The idea of any sort of military demonstration as a solution of our difficulties may be popular in the treaty ports, but it has no relation to realities. We 110 longer live in the days when an expedition to Peking enforced a settlement that held good throughout China. If we took Canton we should have achieved nothing; the seat of the Canton Government is already at Wuchang, far up the Yangtse. Rut this is not a military question at all; it is a political question. In so .far as our troubles do not arise from the civil war and will end with its end, they arise from a national feeling of resentment against the foreigner and the privileged position which for a century he has enforced throughout China.”— “Man'hester Guardian.” Women in the Church.

“It is right that something should be said about the place of women in the Church of the future. I do not think that St- Paul’s prohibition of women speaking in the Church, applying as it did to a particular Church in an Oriental society, can be held to bar the way for all time against them in the ministry of the Church. It will in the end prove impossible that women should be treated as equals of men in the State and their inferiors in the Church. After all, women have always been the more religious of the two sexes. They have understood more fully than men the value and the beauty of religion; they have contributed »s many, perhaps more, holy lives to the service of the Church. Their prayers and their hymns have entered into the private and public worship of the Church. It is difficult to believe that they will always be excluded from the privilege of ministry in the sanctuaries of the Church of England.”—Bishop Welldon. Our Role in China.

“If the trouble continues to spread our role must be confined to the protection of the lives of British subjects. No one in his senses has ever contemplated a war at a vast distance from the British bases to maintain any particular regime in China. In the days of the Taiping movement the British Government did not interfere, though General Gordon entered the Chinese service. It is clearly beyond the power nf any British Government to undertake military intervention in. China.”— “Daily Mail.” Demand for Native Wit.

“What the new century demands of us, I contend, is the development of individuality, and particularly the individuality of average men and women, the people who have hitherto been supposed to have no individuality at all. The mistake we have made in the past is that we have set knowledge in the first place; not educating in the strict sense, but imparting useful information. The mistake is a very natural one; most meh are prone enough to admit their lack of knowledge; but thev are bv no means so ready to admit their lack of wit. As Locke shrewdiv observes: ‘When bv their want of thought . . . they are led into mistake . . . they impute it to any error, accident, or default of others,' rather than to their own want of understanding; that is what nobody discovers or complains of in himself.’ ” —The late Dr. James Ward. The Week-end “Rest.”

“There is real danger that the modern passion for sport, and, still more, the modern opportunities for locomotion, may destroy the possibility of rest, and quiet, and thought, which are no less important elements of a holiday than recreation. The following of a business—in the modern world an increasingly exigent occupation—does more than act as an unhealthy restraint on bodily activity; it is apt to starve the finer sensibilities and to choke the free course of the human spirit. The weekly holiday should be a time of release for the mind, even more than an occasion for the refreshment of the body. Quiet communion with ideal influences is more essential to-day, in the interests of the individual and of the race, than it has ever been before. The need is there, and men can be brought to see its satisfaction as a duty to ' themselves and to their neighbours; but only if the duty is freed from any suggestion of mere taboo.”—“The Times” (Loudon). The Picture and Its Alcssage. “The picture was the first language of man to man. With pictures he made his first records. The artist of the Stone Age told his fellows what he had been seeing by sketching it on the stone walls of his cave, or on a piece of bone, and still his drawing remains for us the fullest message about his life that has been preserved. Strange, is it not, that this language addressed to the eye has come back as the most popular way of appealing to the mighty multitude ? Its simplicity still makes' it the shortest way to the minds of millions. Vast tracts of knowledge may now be presented to millions of brains through the gateway of the eye.”—"Aly Magazine.” What About This? “It has become a habit with nearly every European State to blame the debtcollecting harshness of America for the economic difficulties with which it has now to struggle. This criticism will not bear close inspection in so far as the Central European States are concerned. There the root of the economic evils is the lavish expenditure on armaments. Czecho-Slovakia, with a population of 13,000,000, has a standing army of 150,000 men, 500 aeroplanes, 160 tanks, and 330 batteries. Jugoslavia, with 12.000,000 inhabitants, has an army of 115,000 men, 270 aeroplanes, and 186 batteries. Rumania, with a population of 18,000,000, lias 143,000 men, 250 aeroplanes, 90 tanks, and 330 batteries; while Poland, with a population of 27,000,000, nearly half of whom are not Poles, has a standing army of 300,000 men, 510 aeroplanes. 220 tanks, and 441 batteries. The Americans see no reason wjiy they should forco their debts merelv because certain European nations refuse to cut their coat according to their cloth.’’—A writer in the London “Evening Staudar- 3 .”

Ugliness in Architecture.

“He who pays the piper may call the tune: Few architects are given a free hand to plan according to their own mood. Therefore you may say that the owner of the ugly house was at least as guilty as the architect whom he chose, whose work pleased him. There are private men whose taste in the matter of building is as bad, or worse, than any architect’s taste. So I am not as sure as the gentleman who wrote the letter to the editor that good architecture would flourish ; f houses were plainly signed with the name of their planner. What ; s ugliness in architecture ? I have but one answer to that question: I can answer it plainly. Ugliness is the style in building which does not please me. Come out into the nearest street, and I will point out to you the ugly houses. Yet these which are certainly ugly may be pleasing in your sight. If they bore the architect’s name on them you might be persuaded to take a note of it, as the name of a man you would emplov if you should build a house for yourself'.”—“The Londoner,” in the "Evening News.” A Blain Man's Diet.

“How can we keep our teeth if we give them no work to do ? If a child cannot take pleasure in good crusty bread and butter he must be ill- It is in regard to the food of the growing human that reform is urgently needed. It should be simple. Sugar should be used sparingly; sweets should be barred, and farinaceous food limited almost w.holly to well-baked, crusty bread of sound flour. The more butter the better, and raw vegetable food in the shape of fruit and salad should be given in abundance. The ignorant will deem this an absurdlv rigorous diet, but the gain in health from sound teeth and digestion, freedom from devastating adenoids and kindred maladies, and the feeling of exuberant wellbeing, far out-weigh the pleasure derived from the temporary tickling of the palate by unwholesome, luxurious foods.”—Dr. Harry Campbell, Two Kinds of Courage.

“Into a cupboard his cap is flung: the text-books follow, and a boy steps from fairies to realities. He becomes a man, and enters the great race. He is soon engulfed in the feverish environment ■of ambition, with an eagerness for his taste of the ‘fleshpots’: he wants his song, is ready- to compete in the clash of wits, to steel his nerves so that the tear-ducts are driest when the weariness is .greatest, to keep his head erect when blood is mixing with sweat, to hear no cry except the syren voice ahead that electrifies the feeble knees and stiffens the backbone. He may win a reputation for courage, may call forth the applause of the mighty, the patronage of Kings, the smiles of fair women. . . . Yes, there is .grit in this, but in the noise of success he may lose touch with the calmer voices of the. Infinite, and along the same rough highwav may walk he who shows perhaps a higher courage—the man who dares to step aside, who with squared jaw and proud defiance lives down the jeering of the mob and enters anon into the cool shaded sanctuaries of contemplation to salute his soul, to burnish the gleaming steel of honour, to hear the pleading voice of pain,’to place a coin into a bonv palm and to bring a light of hope into the weary eyes of him who has fallen out of the race. — lhe Humorist.” Pioneers in Knowledge.

“Galen driven from Rome by the jealousv of his rivals; Harvey seeing his .patients leaving him one by one as a result of the feeling fomented by lfis medical colleagues; Jenner journeying back sadly to Berkeley, laughed at bv the London doctors for his impudence in attempting to teach them anything about smallpox; Simpson attacked bv his colleagues for tampering with the' laws of God and Nature in seeking to alleviate pain; Pasteur scorned as a ‘chemist’ when he propounded his bacteria theories; Lister facing the attacks of those of his colleagues who tried to rob him of the honour of his discovery, and likened his methods to the crudities of past ages, with Simpson unbelievably taking the leading part in launching the kind of attacks from which he himself had suffered so much —all these are typical of the pioneer struggling for advance of knowledge against the inertia of conservatism.”— “A.P.” in the "British Journal of Active Therapy.”

“If I Had to Choose.” “If I had to choose between having people who could appreciate music and people who could find out . what is wrong with the cotton trade in LancaI would sacrifice for. the moment the appreciation of music.” “Until there is bread for everybody the discussion of the validity of cake for some is an unjustifiable adventure. We are running a race between education and revolution in which the certainties do not lie obviously on either side. We can make the certainties lie on the side of education if we follow the injunction of Plato and achieve a State ‘in which the Alinister of Education is more important than the Alinister of War.’ ’ — Professor Laski in a speech reported in the “Alancliester Guardian.”

Reforming Parliament. "It is, I think, demonstrable that a fixed term for the life of our Parliament would be a great public reform. Everv Parliament in the past, whether tinder the rule of a Conservative, Liberal or Coalition Government, has protested against the great power, of the Executive, and the tendency to make the general body of the House of Commons a mere instrument for recording the decisions of the Government. Party discipline is maintained through the knowledge that a general election must follow any serious defeat of the Government. The feeling is more, apparent now than at any other time in history. This is due io the greater complexity of the problems, national and international, with which Parliament has to deal. . . - Parliament should be elected for a fixed term. This term should be long enough to enable a coherent and definite policy to be carried out, but not so long as. to cause anv serious danger of the wishes of the country being over-ruled or ignored.”—J. Howard Whitehouse in the “Contemporary Review.”