Evening Post. SATURDAY, JULY 21, 1934. UNKNOWN BENEFACTORS

Evening Post, Volume CXVII, Issue 18, 21 July 1934, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JULY 21, 1934. UNKNOWN BENEFACTORS

M, Andre Maurois, who is one of the contributors to the "Spectator's" symposium ion "Our Greatest Benefactor,"; gives the discussion a very wide range. Finding the difficulties of choice among the known benefactors of mankind to be insuperable m regard to individuals or even to kinds of service, hewanders far away into "the dark backward and abysm of time" to consider the services of those unknown benefactors of the race who taught primitive man to take those first steps on the upward path to civilisation, in comparison with which all the others were relatively easy and'unimportant. What should man's greatest benefactor have done for him? "The ills that poison man's lot are these," M. Maurois answers in the "Spectator" of June/8, "hunger, thirst, cold, fear, and pain," and his benefactor must help him in his desperate struggle against them. The men of those early days were weak and stupid creatures, in constant fear of the wild beasts, without fire or artificial light, uncertain where tomorrow's food supply was to come from, and leading a-timid, harassed, and precarious existence. !

Their true saviours, says M. Maurois, without whom this race of weaklings would doubtless have died out, obliterated by the larger wild beasts, wore the Unknown Man who tamed the horse, the Unknown Man who discovered tho art of making fire, the Unknown Man who invented the stone axo, tho Unknown Man who first sowed seed, and, above all, the Unknown Man who framed tho first rules for his tribe and made it possible to live in common and sleep in peace.

The question arises whether room should not also be found for the Unknown Woman or even the Unknown Child who, when a mother reindeer or wild dog was killed, first made a pet of one of the family and so prepared the way for the domestication of animals. But here, as in* some of M. Maurois's own cases, it is possible that the honour should rather be paid to an Unknown Syndicate— a syndicate so scattered and so devoid of conscious co-opera-tion that even an Unknown Crowd might perhaps be too organic a title for it. For some of the early unknown benefactors M. Maurois bespeaks an honour similar to that already paid to Unknown Warriors by the memorials in Whitehall and under the Arc de Triomphe.

The squares of our capitals, ho suggests, should display the statues of Unknown Inventors. I should like tosee in Trafalgar Square a monument to the Inventor of the Flint Arrow, ■without which there would bis no Trafalgar Square. In Central Park, New York, I should like to see three statues: one of tho Inventor of the Rudder, another of the Inventor of the Sail, and a third of the Inventor of the Compass, for without these three men there would never havo been a New York. ,

Emerging from the thick mists of the swamps and the forests- primeval in which our ancestors surely proved their right to honour by the mere fact of keeping; body and soul together, M. Maurois. leaps a chasm of several thousand years in order to base upon apparently sound historical evidence the claim of an Unknown Harness-maker to he included among our greatest benefactors. Mention was made in a London message on Thursday of the services of British destroyers in the suppression of the slave trade in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The occasion was a function held in London to celebrate the centenary of the emancipation of slaves throughout the Empire. The British Parliament gave the world a great lead when it passed that measure, and the names of Clarkson and Wilberforce are held in high honour for their share in the fight. Lloyd Garrison and Lincoln are among the names that, are simi^rly honoured for the victory of thel Abolition Movement in America a generation later. But the true hero of emancipation, according to M. Maurois, is to be found not among the statesmen and philanthropists of Britain and the United States, nor in the 19th Century, but some nine centuries earlier in a person whose name, and apparently his country also, are unknown.

The back of slavery was broken, M. Maurois tells us, in or about the 10th Century, A.D., and not by religious or intellectual progress or by an increasing refinement of sentiment, but by the invention of a new type of harness. Some man unknown had invented "the collar which enables a horse to apply its whole strength to the moving of a load." M. Maurois's authority for this startiling^statement is a French historian,.

Commandant Lefevre-Desnouettes, whose learned researches he regards as having established the horse-collar as the real cause beyond a donbt of the disappearance of slavery. Apparently parc-Rasing this historian, M. Mauiv o writes:

Look at all ancient pictures, drawings, carvjngs, and you will see the horse's head erect and hooded. "Why? Because the horse, harnessed too high, felt strangled when it made a violent effort. To shift heavy loads, tho blocks of the Pyramids or the stones of a cathedral, whole battalions of hapless labourers were then required. The collar of the horse appears in documents about tho 10th. Contury of our era, and altered tho labourer's lot. In the lieart of some great city of workmen, or at the base of tho Pyramid of Cheops, should stand the stnttie of the Man, who Invented Modern Harness.

The horse-collar certainly seems to ■be reasonably free from those reactions which, as M. Maurois ppints out, are apt to discount the services rendered to humanity by the labours of science.

On second thoughts, lie asks, is there any invention which has not brought tragedy as well as profit in its train? The steam-engine and modern chemistry have put vast forces at man's service, \but have likewise brought unemployment and over-production. Even medical discoveries have not lacked dangerous and unforeseen repercussions. Another of M. Maurois's second thoughts is: Can these great discoveries be attributed to individual men? Here again the horse-collar, seems to stand on safer ground than most of its competitors, but there can be few of them which might not, as we have suggested, be regarded as syndicated.

A resolute individual, says M. Maurois, coinpletos tho invention, but before- him como hundreds of seekers who made it possible, Edison, Marconi, and Rutherford are preceded and surrounded and followed by unknown collaborators who helped and shaped them. Every society is a collective, unconscious inventor. .

Such is the faith of M. Maurois in this collective and unconscious process' of invention that he confidently looks to it for a "new economic form which will replace both Capitalism and Communism, and give us, for some centuries, a new equilibrium." But that the new formula will be found by this or that economist or statesman, by Mr. Keynes or Sir Oswald Mosley, for instance, is regarded by M, Maurois as improbable.

-No single mind, he says, is powerful enough to grasp and arrange all the data of such a problem. But the minds of millions of suffering men gropo their way to a solution. Humanity as a whole is like a giant inventor of the future. The only great bonefactor of men is Time. And how long is it since they made him a god!