POLICY OF ISOLATION

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 97, 18 January 1933, Page 9

POLICY OF ISOLATION

Dangers Stressed by Prof. Macmillan Brown CHANCELLOR’S ADDRESS Some aspects of the effects of a policy of isolation in the individual, the caste, the community or the nation are mentioned by Professor J. Macmillan Brown, Chancellor of the University of New Zealand, in his annual address to the university yesterday. “It is getting painfully driven into human consciousness through the long ages of history that man must advance as an organised army, and not in isolated units,” he said. “The University takes advantage of Nature’s differentiation of individuals and getting the best out of the best of them hands it on from generation to generation,” Professor Brown said. Competition is the method of nature to secure progress. For this no two individuals of the same species are born alike. And man has forged ahead of all other living beings on our planet because he has made this differentiation deliberate and intensive. If only acquired skill and abilities and virtues eouid be made hereditary and passed on from generation to generation, our progress would be lightning swift. Tlie nearest approach we can make to that is by means of higher education. Universities and institutions that prepare for them store up and improve the methods of one generation in order that those which follow may benefit by them. The exceptional individuals of one generation may improve methods and maps of research it lias received from its predecessors and pass on the improvements to those that follow. This is the nearest we come to that much-longed-for hereditary transmission of acquired learning, skill and talent to subsequent generations. Destroys Progress. Isolation of any community destroys its progress by neutralising this power of transmission of the best, as we see in the United States and Soviet Russia. More and more are we coming to realise that self-isolation of the individual, the caste, the community, or the nation is, if not suicidal, at least destructive of this transmission and hence of all progress. The period of depression that is now upon us brings this out more clearly than man has ever seen it before.

“The United States, probably the most advancing, if not advanced, community of our twentieth century, wrapped its cloak around it in order to keep clear of the infection that was reducing the rest of the world to famine in the midst of plenty, is suffering from the strange disease perhaps worse than any other nation in the world. So Soviet Russia, whilst attempting to show its contempt for the other nations of the world and to drag them to its feet as its pupils and converts, is slowly being driven by want into their economic points of view.

“History begins by empire-making, which organises sections of mankind as armies that progress by altruism. It is getting painfully driven into human consciousness through the long ages of history that man must advance as an organised army and not in isolated units, that in fact, altruism is the true law of progress. These recurrent depressions are intensified by the tariff barriers erected by communities against each other. The farther we go back into prehistory the more isolation there Is; each family or tribe counts itself as mankind. The beginnings of history are to be seen in the efforts to break down the barriers that separate the tribes of a region and to form empires or federations which allow or encourage mutual friendly intercourse guided and protected by law. British Commonwealth.

“To cross the great oceans enabled man to advance more rapidly to his unification, and the British Commonwealth of Nations forecasts the goal. Probably the greatest stride man made towards unification was that achieved by his seamanship. As long as he clung to advance over, land, great empires could remain unknown, unrecognised. To cross a vast ocean expecting to find peoples he had known by land-transit separated by a still greater ocean on the other side of a great new continent opened his eyes to the vastitude of the task he had still to accomplish before the unification of his scattered communities could begin. And it is chiefly through sea-traffic that the next stage of this unification will be achieved. “The British Commonwealth of Nations is a forecast of the final goal, a peaceful combination of self-governing communities eager for the interchange of products and ideas and inventions and able to guide this interchange to the advantage of all. Between the units tariff walls will be a matter of conference and will ultimately disappear. And when these are gone disarmament will follow. The settlement of disaagreements will be easier when the League of Nations includes all the communities of mankind, and the constitutents are the universities, the most highly educated and most scientifically-minded men of each nation. “Tlie universities are the national chromosomes that transmit the advances of one community and one generation to others,” Professor Brown added. Of course this ideal is little beyond the dream-stage in which • Tennyson painted it in Locksley Hall half a century ago, “when the war-durm throbbed no longer and the battle-flags are furled. In the parliament of man, the federation of the world.” But even though the League of Nations is incomplete and still faltering in its action, the fact that it has come into being gives us hope that we are on the road to the ideal. And the hope is strengthened by the British Commonwealth of Nations as a working model and by the spread of universities and their influence. These national chromosomes that can transmit the new acquisitions in skill and talent from generation to generation become more and more practical and powerful.”