OVERSEAS OPINIONS

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 202, 23 May 1936, Page 18

OVERSEAS OPINIONS

Revenues of Royalty. “The income from Crown properties has been increasing steadily for many years. About twenty-five years ago it amounted to about £500,000, but it has now risen to nearly three times that sum. At the beginning of the late King’s reign, the income returned by the State to the Crown was fixed at £470,000 a year, but by his voluntary act this was reduced in 1931 by £50,000. In other words the Crown in late years has been paying over to the State well over one million pounds a year and has been drawing in return less than half a million. It may be that the committee in revising the Civil List will restore the voluntary ‘cut’ of £50,000 made in 1931, and if so, we may expect to hear from the Socialists the stock complaints of the large income drawn by the Crown from the taxpayers. It is to be hoped that in any announcement of the annual sum allocated to the Royal Family, occasion will be taken to announce at the same time what is the amount now being received annually by the State from the Crown properties and estates.”—“Macclesfield Courier” (Yorkshire). Primitive Thoughts.

“Lo the poor Indian did not have to fill out an income tax blank. His rude first did not have to attempt the impossibility of putting three quarts of information into a pint pot of a blank space. His eagle eye did not have to follow faint dotted 'ines across a white desert to make certain that he did not enter figures in the wrong column. None of Lo’s neighbours demanded that he make out a duplicate return. No instructions written in brusque Departmentalese, an offshoot of English. swam and blurred before his eyes. He did not have to keep three sets of books to get through a year on fair terms with his conscience, his checking account and his government. He did not have to look through a sheaf of cheque stubs. He did not wake with a start in the night in the fear that be bad forgotten a credit or failed to include an item. Lo not only had time to see God in every cloud, but he probably felt in the mood for it as well.” —“New York Sun.” Factory Locations.

“At the present moment if anybody puts up a factory the State requires him to fulfil certain conditions. People are not allowed to put up factories which are insanitary, or which cause a nuisance to their new neighbours, and this would only be adding one more condition, and, to my mind, a very reasonable and proper condition, that the State should also be satisfied that the general location of the factory was in the national interest. Again, it is only carrying the principle of town planning one step further. We are having the whole country town-planned in little sections. We must follow a logical and consistent policy in this matter. Once you start t<? plan, you must plan completely. I submit that the principle which the special Commissioner laid down in his first report is one which ought to have the support of the Government, as it has, I believe, the support of a majority of Members of the House.” —Viscount Wolmer, M.P.

Democratic Method. “Human life, human suffering and human freedom, constitute the price current in all the dictatorships. And we may note that it is a price exacted before delivery of goods. We must still wait for Stalin’s classless society, for Hitler’s reign of justice and peace, for Mussolini's new Roman Empire; but we already know that in Russia, Germany and Italy human life has been squandered and the human spirit has been degraded. But after all. democracies have built big hydro-elec-tric plants and steel mills without pouring out rivers of blood. They have preserved national unity without reviving jungle race theories. They have reclaimed marshes and cleaned railway cars without suppressing liberty. They have seen other methods tried out with tiring squads, with rubber clubs, with concentration camps, with race proscriptions. with peasant liquidations, with machine-guns, and the results are certainly ugly and as yet unconvincing.”—Simeon Strunsky.

The Moralist in Politics. “Senator Borah is the moralist, in politics, and, more than that, a moral force. The moralist in politics is an unusual phenomenon, for politics is essentially the pursuit of power and thus not conducive to the ways of righteousness. Yet it is just that passion for right-doing that has made Borah what he is and that explains a personality by which many have pretended to he baffled merely because they do not know a moralist when they see one. Everything In Borah is traceable to this fundamental fact, no matter how the circumstances of his life have given his convictions, ideas, and policies their specific shape and colour. American public life would be all the richer if we had more men of the .stamp < ' Borah. He has so many of the attributes of courage, honesty, sincerity, and tolerance that are all too rare at any time. Some of his virtues no doubt look old-fashioned in these debonair days of sophistication and casualness, when cynicism in regard to politics seems to most of us to be the right pose.’’—Spencer Brodney, in the “New York Times” Book Review. Douglas Credit’s Swan Song.

“The school teacher who'was elected Premier of the province of Alberta on a Social Credit platform to give every Albertan 25 dollars a month Social Credit as a starter toward the more abundant life now must come before his people and say, with reference to two bond issues which have matured: ‘We haven’t the money; I'm sorry, but we must default.’ The formula which Premier Aberhart used to announce the default shows his political Inexperience, lie didn’t take advantage of the occasion to launch a bitter attack upon a straw man. In fact, only as an afterthought did he refer to the possibility of token payments as an evidence of Ihe provincial Government’s good faith. Americans who have seen war debts go by the boards to the tune of long communications written in the obscurest of diplomatic language will find a wistful sincerity in Mr. Aberiiart's words Whatever the intricacies of the scheme of Social Credit, the Premier was able to make default clear to all.”—“New A’ork Sun.”

Poison Gas —Italian Brand. “In spite of the violatiou of the Covenant and of the Kellogg Pact, it was hard to believe that the Italian Government would proceed to a deliberate breach of the Geneva Protocol. Red Cross hospitals, it was known, had been bombed, and so had open towns ; but for these violations excitement or genuine error on the part of the airmen engaged might perhaps be responsible. The use of poison gas is open to no such explanation. It would be impossible except with the authority and on the instructions of the centra] Government, and would mean that the Duce had decided to disregard the pledge formally given by Italy as by other nations, to prohibit the use of asphyxiating and poisonous gases as “justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilised world.” The evidence which has now accumulated makes it impossible any longer to ignore the reports or to refrain from expressing the feelings which they have aroused." —“The Times" (London).

Hats, Chivalry and Elevators. “What is it that makes an elevator sacred? One may walk along the corridor of a public building. chatting with a woman and wearing the chapeau. But as soon as one steps into the elevator with the same woman, off comes his hat. Right here a venture may rashly be made into the zone between chivalry and practical things. In a crowded elevator, largely occupied by women, it is just supererogation in a man. But you can’t get your hat 'down in the space that usually remains. Sure, you can hold the bat up where all may sec it,.even if that does appear to be display of the hat, or assertion that you deem yourself a gentleman, justifiable or not. But the procedure entails elbow play, wherever the hat is held, and that, too. may cause embarrassment. Besides, what outward reward is given for such deference? Hat dotting in this instance is a ve.stigal custom. But try to make a feminine observer see that point, and see where you get. If we are preserving other appurtenances and manners of the past in an age of crowded elevators, we just, can’t discard this one —not yet awhile. —“Minneapolis Journal.”

Nobility Less Obliging. “The aristocracy no longer snubs and cuts the plutocracy, for the good reason that there is now no longer any distinction between the two classes. The modern aristocrat either is the plutocrat ennobled; or else, if of old family, he has in most cases ceased to derive his income from the land and gone into business—that is to say into competition or, more often, into parasitic collaboration with the speculator and forestaller. The beam in the eye of aristocracy is identical with the beam in the eye of plutocracy. Nobility is still supposed to oblige : but it no longer obliges its possessors to condemn or even personally to refrain from antisocial and parasitic money-making. Snobbery once had in it an element that was socially beneficent. There was a time when the successful speculator or forestaller was snubbed and cut —partly for being a bounder and parvenu, but partly also for having, behaved in a morally undesirable way That does not happen nowadays. The rules of snobbery have changed and so have the objects of its anathemas. Even in Stately Home and Baronial Hall, “a rich man has every right.”—Aldous Huxley.

The Third Degree. “It is to be hoped that old style police officers who think that the way to get a ‘confession’ from a suspect is to beat him up or torture him. will read carefully the condemnation of ‘third degree' methods printed in the current issue of ‘The Investigator,' an organ of the United States Federal Investigation Bureau ‘Every hand laid on a prisoner to extort a confession is a step backward,' writes Special Agent Chaytitz. ‘lt constitutes an admission of failure. It cries out publicly (hat crime detection is a bullying, bungling job for the stupid.' ‘Unfortunately in the past '‘crime detection” has too often been just that thing. It is true that sometimes in dealing with known gangsters, temptation to use strong arm methods have been next to irresistible, particularly in bandit-ridden communities. But the net result in most instances has been a degradation of agents and agencies of justice. The dependence upon mind instead of tist or bludgeon, and the use of science and shrewdness instead of torture lights or of arm twisting, which are emphasised among the G-men, are not the least of the services they are performing for the United States.* ” —“Detroit Free Press.'*The Medical Psychologist.

"My view 7 of the work of the medical psychologist in Industry is that he must take a share in directing people of nervous make-up into occupations where they will have a chance of success (the nervous subject is often an excellent worker when in the right place) ; within the organisation he should be able to direct, if not carry out, work that will enable the emotional attitudes of the worker to be recognised so that smooth and harmonious relations can be maintained. Here comes a warning. Cases of discontent are not always recognised by the discontented ones, or, even if recognised, may find indirect expression. Some kinds of work are known to the industrial psychologist to be especially irksome and productive of discontent, but the workers may not recognise this although it may manifest itself in difficult behaviour. What appear to the outsider as monotonous occupations are much less productive of discontent. Indeed, the monotony often exists only in the eye of the beholder. If people can divide their attention .‘mil think of other tilings, then they can stand the monotony."—Professor Millais Colpin, in ‘‘lndustrial Welfare” (London).

The Foundations of Peace. “One of the main foundations of die peace of Western Europe has been co' away, and if peace is to be secured there is a manifest duty to rebuild It is in that spirit that we must approach the new proposals of the German Chancellor. The Government will examine them clear-sightedly and objectively with a view to finding out to what extent they represent a means by which the shaken structure of peace can again be strengthened. In the present grave condition of international affairs, the Government must feel that no opportunity must be missed which offers any hope of amelioration.” —Mr. Anthony Eden. Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.