TOPICS OF THE DAY

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 118, 14 November 1929, Page 8

TOPICS OF THE DAY

New regulations governing appointments to Training Colleges are undoubtedly framed to give the Education Department control. It is surprising that the Minister of Education should have sanctioned this. When a difficulty arose formerly in the selection of a principal for the Wellington Training College, the present Minister (according to the chairman of the Education Board) was directly opposed to the action of the Minister and the Department. Now he has evidently accepted the Departmental viewpoint, and agreed to do himself what he considered Mr. Wright was wrong in doing. His action seems l inexplicable. There may be reasons for altering the system of control of training colleges; but if great changes in the whole system of educational government are contemplated there is surely the strongest argument against piecemeal alteration in the direction of centralisation. Such piecemeal alteration savours very much of an attempt to force upon the board the opinion of the Department in respect to a particular appointment. The need lor'alteration in the regulations has not been shown. Under the old regulations the power of selection rested with the board acting in consultation with a highly competent Committee of Advice. Ministerial approval of'the choice was necessary before the appointment could be made, but there was no power vested, in the Minister or Department, to over-ride the board and committee. Under the new regulations the Minister can force his choice upon'- the board. The board and committee can recommend, but there is no power in their recommendation unless it is pleasing to the Minister. Under such conditions it is not to be expected that competent men will continue to act. They will refuse to offer advice which can be rejected at will. By indirect means centralisation will be achieved. If the Minister stands for centralisation and has no confidence in the local administration, let him say so frankly. Then we shall know where we stand.

"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." Not so, however, with war; "the horrors pale, the glamour doth remain." Such at any rate is the suggestion plain enough in the speech of the Duke of York, reported in to-day's cablegrams. Like almost all generalisations, this one must be taken. with reservations. When Captain Bean estimated the other day that it cost the enemy four million deaths to lose the war, and it cost the Allies 50 per cent, more deaths than that in order to win, he stated enough to satisfy all reasonable men. If it is still true, as the Duke of York says, that to the generation now growing up. the horrors of the Great War appear merely as the horrors of the Crimean War appeared to their fathers, then—so far as the past is concerned—the best corrective seems to be a studied balance in the work of all historians and writers, so that the debits are never masked in order to build up the credits. More than that can hardly be asked of historians. While history need not be the "drum-and-trum-pet" affair that John Richard Green complained of in the last century, historians have a duty towards the glory of those who gave all to defend their country; and can do that duty without transforming glory into glamour, and without concealing the fundamental crime against civilisation for which no one Government or one man is entirely responsible. Probably General Sit Tom Bridges's remarks on "War as an^ Adventure" fit badly into this concept. The man who "found the war the four j oiliest years of his life" does exist, but he is not the type with whom one mentally brackets the V.C. But only a small part of the literature of war is concerned with its d'Artagnans; and if post-war literature does its duty even moderately well, the chief element in the story of the war will be self-sacrifice, with the. emphasis on the "sacrifice" and not on ' the "self."

The Duke of York is nevertheless right when he maintains that, in order to avoid war in future, the education of youth will, depend not so much on the historic and literary presentation (whether militant or pacifist) of the past as on a correct analysis of the present:

It was not the horrors of the past, but a right understanding of the problems which faced us, that would achieve the result which we ardently desired. The young man must be made to understand the world he lives in the economic world so vastly different from last century's—and how much it has to lose through war, how little to-gain. (The reverse, by the way, of Junker education up to 1914) If the educationists fail m that, the failure is mainly their own. It would be useless to blame Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" or (on the opposite side) another and lesser known postCrimean lyric, that popular song which pictures the soldier's widow mortified by her son's participation in a bonfire to celebrate a Crimean battle, in which, unknown to him, his father had been killed—

She couia not bear to see his. -my .For by his father's life 'twas won And made him a poor orphan boyi

Neither literature nor doggerel has ever ignored the horrors of war; and literature is still less likely to do so in the future. Nevertheless, the hope of the future lies in educating youth not so much in past effects as in present causes. A remembrance of Captain Bean's figures is worth

something. A thorough exploration of the whole question of freedom of the seas, with all its pitfalls, is worth more.

Commenting on building progress in Lower Hutt Borough, the Mayor (Sir A. F. Roberts) stated a couple of days ago that October showed 72 building permits, value £44,689, as against 45 permits, value £17,940, in October of 1928. Of the 72 permits, 37 are for dwellings, value £38,774. These figures, and the marked building progress in the Upper Valley of the <Hutt, seem to exemplify the report of the Government Statistician (published in Tuesday's issue) that tho building industry reflects the expansion in the State Advances business, showing a high level of activity while the land-transfer and mortgage businesses continue <m high levels.

It is said, that the increase in State Advances has increased the number of buyers of vacant land, but not the number of buyers of land carrying houses. From the concluding terms of the following statement by the Government Statistician, the building improvement would seem to be noi even throughout the Dominion:—

According to the value of building permits issued in the larger towns during September, there has been a marked increase in activity in the building industry. The figure recorded for that month showed gains of 5.6 per cent, and 18 per cent, respectively over August, 1929, and September, 1928. This increase ' has brought the nine-monthly totals for the current year slightly above those for last year, but the twelve-monthly moving figures still show a decrease of 7.8 per cent.

It is probable that most of the dwelling demand is in certain rapidly expanding suburbs of certain population centres. In our correspondence columns on Tuesday the question of over-production was raised, and was answered by the State Advances Office.

Undoubtedly the death of the Hon. J. A. Robb in Canada will be a loss to Canadian Liberalism. He was a silent and sturdy pillar of the Australian trade treaty (with which New Zealand enjoys equal advantages in Canada), just as the Conservative leader, Mr..Bennett, is its vociferous enemy. Never too vocal but always influential, Mr. Robb was a moderating, and Empire-building factor that the Canadian Liberals will not easily replace. The relations of the Canadian Government and the last Reform Government of New Zealand were always excellent, and probably the. same condition obtains to-day, but there has never been much noise about the . matter. As long as the Robb policy continued, it was fairly certain that Canada as a whole would not object to the entry of New Zealand butter to fill a want occasioned by the absorption of Canadian milk and cream by the United States. But with the loss of Mr. Robb's personal touch, and the unknown effect on Canadian policies of the United States tariff, the future is less certain. There is as yet no sign that any abatement of the exclusionist tendency of the United States tariff as against Dominion products will come as a gracious sequel to the Hoover-Mac-Donald conversations on naval reduction. .. -