OVERSEAS OPINIONS

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 242, 9 July 1938, Page 1 (Supplement)

OVERSEAS OPINIONS

Government Financing. “To whatever party he belongs, a Chancellor of the Exchequer has to remember that it is worse than useless to go beyond the point at which the money and the credits that be is dispensing represent real values. A Government may have a very fine programme, but if the goods and commodities necessary to carry it out are not in existence, or cannot quickly be produced, then the moneys or credits voted for them have simply a paper value, and to put them into circulation is to diminish the value of all the money already in circulation. This is the point to be watched in all modern Budgets, and we need to watch it rather anxiously when we are spending and borrowing largely on armaments. A skilful Chancellor of the Exchequer can do much to ease the nation’s burdens, but the one thing he cannot do is to create wealth.—Mr. J. A. Spender, in the “Yorkshire Observer.”

France’s New Law For Art. “I have just spent five months in Paris, and have been to Czechoslovakia and other places. One thing struck me as extraordinarily important —the new law for art in France,” says Mips Amelia Defries, in a speech reported in the “Journal of the Koyal Society of Arts.” “From the age of five, every child in France is to be educated to appreciate, and otherwise to have good taste. The French have said that they cannot compete with the mass-produc-tion countries. That is a very important point, and by that they really mean America and Japan. They saj, therefore, that they will fall back on their historic culture and make their stand as the country of excellence in the arts. They will, as a beginn.ng, show the children, that they need not be less intelligent than their ancestors, and that the ways of making a door, for example, are not one but many. They do not envisage a nation of artists. but a discriminating public; and they also think that individuals who are worth training can be trained better than they have been recently. It is worth our while to study this new French law.”

Diplomacy Under Test. “Diplomatically, of course, the British Government are interested in an orderly solution of European problems wherever they occur, and especially at this moment in Czechoslovakia. The acute difference which' has arisen in that country between the German population ard the Czechoslovak Government concerns primarily those two parties. But Great Britain and France, as members of the League of Nations, are in this case connected with it by the Minority Treaty of 1919; and Germany has operly, though not formally, espoused the cause of Herr Henlein. The campaign of antiCzech propaganda in the German Press is not auspicious. It is. an any case, quite clear that none but a drastic remedy is likely to brlrg a premanent solution; and drastic solutions—especially if they involve any revision of the Peace Treaties—have so far only rarely been achieved by preventive diplomatic action. There is the more reason why the two countries should be ready, as they are. to be active in the promotion of a peaceful settlement.” — “The Times” (Lordon).

A Call to University Students. “To the young university student in whatever country he 'Or .she may be, the kind of world that is going to be for the next twenty years is vital, because on that depends whether you are going to live a happy, useful life or a life in which you are goirg to put your brains into destroying each other. There is no question that if you had a first-class war between even only two great European States toj’ay it would be even more destructive than that horrible experience of 1014 to 1918. What can we do to prevent it? That is the question we are all thinking about, I hope. If the universities in the several countries cannot produce for the next fifteen years those who are going to lead their nation, then I think they had better close down. The purpose for which they exist is to provide trained minds ultimately for leadership. If university students in the, different countries can keep in contact with each other and can share each other's ideals without sacrificing their own national characteristics, they ought to have the future of the world in their bands in the next ten, fifteen or twenty years.” —Sir Charles Grant Robertson, ViceChancellor of Birmingham University, welcoming a party of German exchange students.

Quandary in Czcchoslovaltia. “How is It possible,” asks the “Manchester Guardian," “to grant the Germans in Czechoslovakia Home Rule of any kind without also surrendering to the Nazi majority the German Jews. Socialists and pacifists who live in the same districts? Then there is the question of the Czech Government’s foreign policy, aud especially its pact with Russia. No minority can possibly claim to control a country’s policy, but, since everything is really dependent on Germany, this too must be taken into consideration. Most of these points must be decided by the Czechs themselves and the British Government can do little more than preserve an atmosphere in which negotiation is possible. But it should be remembered that, as Mr. Winston Churchill has pointed out, the more we encourage the Czechs to concede, the more we are morally bound to support them if the concessions should fail.”

Hitler and Jazz. “However they may differ from Herr Hitler in some matters, thinking people will heartily approve his ban on jazz and all that goes with it,” writes Mr. Arthur Mee in the “Children’s Newspaper.” “It is one of the strangest things in modern history that the American people, who still treat the thirteen million negroes and half-castes of America with scorn and too often lynch them, should have borrowed from them savage rhythms which, make the substance of the noises known as jazz, swing, hot-numbers, and other names as stupid as the matter they seek to describe. From America jazz has spread to Europe, and with it the crooners who moan through the microphone, as well as the general degradation of musical instruments. Upon all these , deformities of the body the ’’ Germans are frowning. The Hitler Youth Movement is restoring to Ge many the lovely folk-songs and Rances and the entire heritage of German music.”

Australian Home for Jewish Exiles.

"There is not the remotest chance of thirty thousand Australians or English people settling in Kimberley in the next thirty years. Settlement on any large intensive scale is impossible there without the expenditure of large sums of money on developing ports and harbours, building roads and ra-lways, damming rivers for irrigation, and capital works of various kinds. Australia needs all the money she can raise or borrow for similar works in her settled, or partly-settled, areas, and she has need of all her people for production and development there. In these circumstances( I, as an Australian, suggest that Australia could do nothing more eminently to her advantage than to make an offer to the Jews which might , promote large-scale. Jewish settlement in Kimberley. Driven in tens of thousands by vile persecution from their present homes in Europe, most of them unable to find a new home in Palestine, unwelcome in any number of other communities with unemployment troubles and immigration laws, Jews must, for their salvation, find a lan'd where any man may sit under his own vine and fig trees, untroubled and secure.” —Mr. C. H. Chomley, the Editor of "British Australia and New Zealander,” in an Interesting letter to the “Jewish Chronicle.’’ A Free Press.

“In view of the system of a controlled Press which is prevailing today over a large part of Europe, is it not more than ever important that our own free Press should paint as fair a picture as possible of the country in which it exercises its freedom? I should be the last to advocate any restraint on the right to free and fair criticism, but it should surely be exercised with a full sense of responsibility. What I suggest is that in writing for our own neople we should preserve a standard of intelligence, decency and self-respect which is not only due to our own people, but which will represent them abroad in a better and, I believe, a truer light if we sometimes stop and think of the impression that cheap and irresponsible writing may produce elsewhere. Democracy, whether in Parliament or in the Press, is not an easy system to practise, especially in a world where it has been largely abandoned. We lay bare our weaknesses and defects in order that they may be remedied by the force of public opinion. But it surely wrong to wash dirty linen in public unless our object is to make it clean, and unless we are prepared to make helpful suggestions as to how it should be made clean.”—Mr. Anthony Eden.

Europe’s Danger Zone. “Now that conditions In Czechoslovakia are quieter,” says “The Times” (of London), the suggestion may be heard here and there that the crisis was never so acute as it was made to appear. But the truth is rather the other way. All the elements of an international explosion were present—an election held amid racial rivalries, in a neighbourhood where three countries meet, and with tempers already inflamed ; the whole contest dominated -by an unsolved minority problem; frontier incidents actually occurring, and part of the Czech army mobilised. The success of diplomacy is prevention. If there had been less firmness and less restraint in the various capitals concerned —most of all in Prague and Berlin—violence might by this time have driven diplomacy into tl ■ background. As it is, settlement by negotiation holds the field. Many flattering tributes to An-glo-French diplomacy have been paid in many countries. The activity of the British Government may indeed be said to have been well conceived, timely, and purposeful.’’ “The Onset of Caesarism.”

“Europe has been brought face to face with decisive history. Hitler has taken a nation, its 7,000,000 souls, its mines and factories, its army. We have each been startled, In rectory and villa and East End back-room, even the least political of us,” wirtes Dr. Havelock Ellis in “Reynolds News.” “We begin to see some of the immediate results of this event,” adds Dr. Havelock Ellis. “They increase our anxiety, we watch the shadows of the big bombers draw nearer to our roofs, over the heads of our children playing in the garden and street. Memories stir of the old Junker threat, we wonder if it is possible for the name of our ancient nation to be blotted like Austria’s from among the earth's peoples. All this is natural, necessary: it is this stirring of millions that shakes down Governments, however strongly based. But these events are only in the immediate foreground. Behind, rearing up in such vast outline that it is seldom glimpsed at all. is a far profounder issue, so terrifying and fateful that it changes Che meaning of our entire epoch. No life escapes its dominance. It is the onset of Caesarism.” Britain’s Latent Energies.

“When I arrived at the Ministry of Munitions in the last year of the war and had time to find out all that was happening, we were prolucing just over 2000 a month. When the war ended we were producing just over 2500 a month. I am here to say—and I challenge contradiction from anyone who knows the facts—that had the war gone on through 1919 (that would have bben a disastrous affair for mankind had it happened) we should quite certainly have tad in the ensuing year 40.000 first-line aeroplanes. Here are we professing timidity and wondering what to do because we, are only going to produce between 3000 and 4000, and all the time 'we have it in our power, by applying the appropriate remedy, as was done in those days, to produce 40.000. No one would suggest that we should do that, but if it be true, as I think it is, that the Prime Minister would welcome any plan by which he could convince all our friends or possible enemies—and we are very apt to have kaleidoscopic changes—that he has got a machine which would do a thing of that kind if he were to turn on the tap, it would make his task far easier in restoring sanity to Europe.”