CURRENT TOPICS

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LIV, Issue 21, 17 March 1933, Page 2

CURRENT TOPICS

j A name famous too soon is a very heavy burden.—Voltaire. * » • * The envious man is in pam upon all occasions which ought to give him pleasure.—Addiscn. * * * * Everything matters more than we think it does, and, at the same time, nothing matters so much as we think. —Samuel Butler. * » * * Legitimate reasoning is impossible without severe thinking, and thinking is neither an easy nor an amusing employment.—Coleridge. * * » Seek always for the best words and -the happiest expressions you can find. Do not content yourself with being barely understood; but adorn your thoughts, and dress them as you would your person.—Chesterfield. j » * • It often amuses me to hear men impute all their misfortunes to fate, luck or destiny, while their successes or good fortune they ascribe to their own sagacity, cleverness or penetration. It never occurs to such minds that light and darkness are one and the same, emanating from, and being a part of, the same nature.—Coleridge. I » * » "The weight of opinion,," states tbe Dally Telegraph, "is that our own recovery will be rather gradual than rapid. There are those, however, who think that in the course of 1933 the 'depression will disperse.' It is agreed that the basic industries have' at last a hopeful outlook again, with their home market reviving and colonial and foreign buyers coming back to them. Already there are evidences of a renewed vigour of enterprise in production and salesmanship. We have by the straining efforts of the past year recovered our position as the first of the exporting nations. The New Year may well see our trade expanding vigorously in the home markets and the markets of the Empire till we lead the world to a new prosperity." * * «

"There is one final and iniversal lesson," says the Observer of London. "Nations intending to recover from the slump and to rebuild prosperity upon solid bases must keep out of war. Causes of dispute are in many cases serious, and in some cases profound. But however nations may settle their differences or suspend their reckonings, war as a resort remains economically, financially, and politically unthinkable for the industrial democracies, and, above all, for our own. They have had enough of it fcr this generation. They would fight more formidably than ever for unavoidable defence, but for that alone. The depth of this pacific temper is not the least asset of the British people. They know that the courage, fibre, judgment, staying power they have shown through the worst of the economic crisis will endure to the end and pull them clean through." • • »

"If, out of the present crisis, we can discover some less cumbrous method of dealing with our policy than the party system as it has been worked in the past, we shall certainly have taken an important step forward in our political life," said the Bishop of Oxford in a recent address. "As in the State, so in the Church, we are accustomed to something like a party system, and it is notorious that the Church at large suffers from what we call unhappy diversions. Many of the characteristics of the political party system are repeated in our religious life, and are, I think everyone would admit, a serious handicap in carrying on the work for which the Church was called into being. There are, all over the world, a vast number of societies calling themselves Christian and yet repudiating one another. It is not difficult to imagine how it all happened. But there can be no question that it is unsatisfactory."

* * * "Suppose that all trade union leaders," says Sir William Beveridge, an economist and authority on industrial questions, "intent on high wages began to think instead of high output: for it is from that that high wages have to come. How many trade

unionists who talk cf better trade organisation by employers have yet given positive help towards it? Yet one cannot combine high wages with restrction of output, a rising standard of life with resistance to new machines or new methods. If a man wants to go on working exactly as his father did before him, why should he expect to be better off than his father? Suppose, on the other side, that every employer sets as his goal the affording of the highest possible wages for the most regular possible work. How many employers now look on their businesses m that way, and not as a source of income or a means of providing, if need be, careers for their sons? Yet all leadership is a public trust and not a private possession. All leadership is a trust, and every employer as a leader has influence over the lives and fortunes of numbers."

"I believe that the theatres and the cinemas, and those who manage them and perform in them and are employed by them, have an exceedingly important part to play in the life __ the community," said Dr. Garfield Williams, Dean cf Manchester, in a recent address to the profession. "An industrial civilisation makes the problem of recreation an extraordinarily difficult one to solve, and I doubt very much whether it can be solved in our days, apart from the theatre and the cinema. Recreation in the j conditions which obtain in our cities is net a luxury; it is a necessity. And those who are engaged in the theatrical profession and its allied industries and arts are performing an essential function in the life of the community, and never more essentially than in these exceedingly difficult days, when it is of the highest importance that from time to time people's minds should be free from the continual pressure of contemporary limitations." * * * *

"I want to be practical. We are living in a very strange and very demanding times. Every man who declares that the world is mad tends to increase its insanity," writes Dr. F. W. Norwood in the City Temple Tidings. "Every growler is a speck of dust in the mechanism of the world. Every man who denies the reality of truth increases the harvest of lies. Every man who fears increases the world's greatest peril, its terror. You business men do not need a preacher like me to explain the financial condition of the world to you, but even a tyro like myself can see quite clearly that what Is the matter with the pound, the dollar and the franc is something pyschological. Nobody can trace out nowadays the actual relation between money and the values they are supposed to represent. But if men fear, the value of money falls, and if men believe, the value of money abides or enhances. You cannot see the cost of naked unbelief in terms of the soul—you had better have a look at it in terms of material values. Men of faith are needed today. Without men of faith nothing good can happen. With men of faith something great and good will happen." * * * *

"The League is neither more nor less than what the Governments comprising it make it," writes Sir Norman Angell, in Time and Tide, on the trouble with Japan and China. "If it has small power it is because those who compose it have given it small powers. Propose to give it more, which means, of course, greater commitments to it, and the League critic immediately holds up his hands in horror. Never, he tells us, would he agree to endow it with greater authority. Why does he object to it? Because it has so little authority. Here, too, we see the inadequacy of the nationalist standards. It is not a simple question of Chinese self-de-termination v. Japanese Imperialism. Japan has rights in Manchuria; and Manchuria is not Chinese if some of the past Chinese protestations against the 'Tartar Tyranny' are to be accepted at their face value. The main problem is to give the League power—not necessarily military power, but some form of sanction which may make it worth while for litigants not to defy justice by being their own judges. That power heretofore we have always baulked at giving to the League. Somehow, we must manage in the future so to endow the new institution."

While the number of people on the staff of the Post Office has decreased by 997, there is an increase of 1152 in the Inland Revenue in Britain as compared with a year ago,

Convicts in the American State prison at Lincoln, in Nebraska, may now enjoy a wireless programme— if they are prepared to buy their own headphones.