THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 172, 17 April 1942, Page 4

THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

Comments—Reflections The multitude grasp at gain more than honour. —Aristotle. » » » “We may indulge nightly in our national pursuit of armchair grumbling, but the black-out over our buildings is nothing compared with the black-out of mind and soul in Europe today. Thia crime against mankind has proved that all we have and all we are must go into this struggle, so that those locked doors may be unlocked, and those curtained windows shutting out the light drawn open.”— Mr. Ernest Brown, Minister of Health.

“A moral religion must be a religion of moral action. In every age there have been men in the Church who were helpless in great emergencies. They have divided the counsel of earnest souls and confused the discussion of desperate issues. But there have always been the men who knew that Israel must act. The immediate imperative has not been bidden from their eyes. The spectacle of courage betrayed by misguided thinking and of cowardice hiding under spiritual assumptions, of minds confused by false principles is always woeful enough. But there is the other good spectacle of the men who understand 'the times and Who know and declare what Israel ought to do.” —From an address at Columbia University by Dean Lynn Harold Hough, of Drew University, U.S.A.

One of the most cheering aspects of night attacks was the gradual increase of successes that came to our nightfighters, principally the Hawker Hurricane, Boulton Paul Defiant, American Douglas Havoc, and the new Bristol Beaufighte'r. This great aeroplane, with two 1400 Bristol Hercules engines, has the extremely formidable offensive armament of four cannons and six machineguns. It has a maximum speed of 330 m.p.h., and a high rate of climb. The night-fighter’s crowning achievement came on the night of May 10, when over 30 German bombers were destroyed. It was radiolocation, the invention devised and almost perfected after years of scientific research, that aided the nightfighters.- The device is a method of locating enemy aircraft so that the defending fighters are given information enabling them to approximate their position, and contact them in the darkness very much more easily.—Mr. Eric Sargent on "The War in the Air and its Developments,’’ in the “Daily Mail” Year Book.

"We are asked not to use trains; we cannot get petrol; we look like getting 'back to the simpler amusements of generations ago; and it may do this generation a lot of good to do so,” said the Lord Mayor of Birmingham, at a recent Youth Hostels gathering. “A hiking or cycling holiday is obviously from a health point of view much better than a motoring holiday, rushing round the country, staying at expensive hotels where nobody loves you, and where in these days the food is not too good. It may even be a good thing for the nation as a whole not to have so much money and not to -be able to afford luxuries that have a tendency to make us soft. The post-war world will not be a place for weaklings. We shall not be able to take life easily. People who think they are going to be able to take things easily after the war had better learn to hike now. .. . Youth hostels provide shelter and simple food, and for those who appreciate the recreative as well as the curative value of fresh air and the open road, they are of inestimable value.”

“German listeners, he who speaks to you today was fortunate enough to do something for the intellectual reputation of Germany in the course of his long life. ... I warned you, when it was not yet too late, against the depraved powers under whose yoke you are harnessed today and who lead you through innumerable misdeeds to incredible misery. How are things with you? Don’t you think we abroad know just as well as you do? Degeneration and misery are spreading. Your young men, including boys of 16, are unscrupulously sacrificed to the Moloch of war, hundreds of thousands of them—millions—there is no home in Germany which is not mourning for a husband, a. brother or a. son. Collapse Is near. Your troops in Russia lack doctors, nurses, medical supplies. In German hospitals the severely wounded, the old and feeble are killed with poison gas—in one single institution, two to three thousand, a German doctor said. These are the deeds of the same regime which roars indignantly when Roosevelt accuses it of destroying Christianity and all religion.”—From an appeal by Mr. Thomas Mann, the German author, now in the United States, to the German people.

“Our duty as civilians is three-fold, and there is a clarion call to us to discharge it. First we must stive hard. But as a supplementary and positive duty, we must leii'd every penny \ve can spare to the State. There was never a time when there was more need for thrift. Let our thrift be not sporadic, but habitual—remembering that in peacetime thrift is a private virtue, but in war-time it is a public duty. There is no room for spectators in the world drama which is being unfolded before our eyes today. Idleness is always contemptible. Today it is nothing short of criminal. Let each of us search his conscience, and decide whether or not; be is putting forth the maximum effort of which he is capable. But there is yet another duty. We know that there is high authority for the statement that ‘he who endures to the end shall be saved.’ Till the day of victory dawns our thoughts are centred, not on peace, but on war. When Hitler and all his gangsters lie on Ihe rubbish heap of history, our land, purged and cleaned of the annealing tires of war, will rise from the dead ashes of the past, and a Britain, which i? now rent and riven by the havoc of war, will give place to a Britain which will be the home of a jieaceful, contented, and victorious race.”—Lord Alness at a National War Savings meeting in Edinburgh. * » » To One Entering the Army. This grim essay is not an interval Of your real life, transient and set apart. This is your life itself: live it with all The depth and resolution of your heart. —Arthur Davison Ficke in I lie '"New York Times.”