A WORLD PARLIAMENT

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 13, 17 January 1933, Page 6

A WORLD PARLIAMENT

A RADIO POSSIBILITY

VAST .RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

Concluding his presidential address ,ai; the meeting of the Senate of the New Zealand University to-day, Professor J. Maemillan Brown (Chancellor) said, that if wireless communication advanced in the future with the promise that its development in this century gave, it would be no idle dream to expect a world audience for every debate of "the parliament of man." v.'ln fact," he said, "man may by that time have reached such, a stago of intercommunication that a conference could proceed without the representatives meeting together. Thus all the vulgarities of demagoguery and the shallow appeals of emotional oratory would be ayoidod, even if they- should ever come into being.

"When we pick up our daily newspaper in the vmorning, we seem to be taking a seat in the dress circle of the theatre of mankind. But there is leally no unity or clarity; light crosses and obscures light, scene obscures scene, plot intertangles with' plot, comedy camouflages tragedy; the drama of life is a network of Gordian knots. Unless the reader has visited and personally examined the various arenas that conflict and intertwine he is helpless in the "struggle to find cue to the mystery on mystery. Tho world' is a battlescene with countless struggles going on, the issue of none of which is clean With all these new means of rapid and far intercommunication journalism only makes confusion more confused. Before the dream of a world parliament can be realised this- twilight intershadowing must vanish and leave the stage of mankind's life clear to the eyes of all. .

"Without a doubt man has still long to wait for the fulfilment of that dream of the f sderation of the world. And the factor in its fulfilment that needs most development is the higher education. The universities are still far from being perfect transmitters of new ideas and skill from community to community, from, generation to generation. Nations and peoples must learn that their development should not be stinted -by economising their funds even during depressions. • "THE COMMONPLACE MIND.'' "Tho parliaments we have reached I in occidental civilisation- represent the average commonplace mind and will never attain or produce anything but the- commonplace; in other words, with such means of advance there can b© no real advance Whatever progress' is made by the civilisation must be outside of these and in spite of these. It must be made, by the scientific, the researchers, and the. exceptional student minds, that is to say., by the universities and their products. If and when man through countless millenia of struggle and education and leadership by the exceptional original minds comes near the possibility of universal disarmament and unification of the world, he will have to jettison these instruments of the average mediocre minds, the parliaments of -universal suffrage, if he has not already long ago jettisoned them.

"In order to rise to cosmic heights of thought and discovery, ha musb> send only his noblest thinkers to his world parliament so that no moment of time shall be wasted on the trivial and evanescent. Pernaps by that time the commonplace-minded will have vanished from the scene and left only the men and women of great and progressive thought. Tho whole world will then be one great research university that advances, and trains to advance by leaps and bounds. Then will have disappeared all division into races and nations; there will be one common language; and the conquest of the air will have been completed; human transit will be that (,£ birds, and war will have become but a horror of the past.

"Such an ideal as the goal of human endeavour it is the duty of every university to hold in front of it. " It is tho truo democracy,' the demos being the finest minds most: finely and scientifically trained and developed.'A