STUDENTS AFLOAT

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 13, 16 July 1923, Page 6

STUDENTS AFLOAT

There is much in the. idea of sending University students on a tour of the Dominions, as outlined ia the cablegrams published today. The originator is the Rev. Christopher Storrsj who is' anxious that there should be closer touch between Great Britain and Greater Britain beyond the seas, to their mutual advantage; also that the young men of the British Universities should be induced to think Imperially by deriving at first hand knowledge which text-books cannot so well supply. The proposal is to send some. three hundred students on a, cruise of the British Empire. They would study, when at sea. When they came to any British country included in their itinerary they would study on shore the social, economic, political, and other conditions of the particular country visited. They would then return to Great Britain with a considerable amount of practical knowledge of the Oversea- Dominions. So equipped, they would be the better able to serve the Em' pire as a whole than if their education was concerned mainly with the traditional interests of Great Britain. Some,- indeed, as Mr. Storrs suggests, may return to the particular Dominion that they have f een and that has made the most favourable impression on them, and so place the knowledge they have gained at the disposal of that Dominion. It would be premature, in the absence of full details, to say more than commend any scheme that will make more widely-known at Home the national aspirations and peculiar conditions of the various Dominions. Anything that will clear away much of the haze over British conceptions of the self-governing Dominions is most welcome. The scheme might also fit these young men .to attain to the ideal of Conrad's fisherman of Devon, ," a man ready for the obvious, no matter how startling, how terrible or menacing, yet defenceless as a child before the impulses of his own heart." They would, we feel sure, be well received by University students in all the Dominions.