THE MAN-POWER.

Gisborne Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 4785, 5 February 1918, Page 6

THE MAN-POWER.

AN ANATOMIST OF FACTS

Sir Auckland Geddes (says tlie Daily Mail) is one .of the new men the war has produced. Three years ao- 0 be was Professor of Anatomy at M’Gill University. Montreal, Canada, with a reputation as a scientific investigator of problems in anthropology biology. Behind this ,was a history of student days at Edinburgh—where he played Rugby for his University and maintained the Geddes tradition for .brains and courage—war service in South Africa, and then again surgery and research. He is a man that will never be taken for any one but himself—'clean-shaven, highdomed forehead, large, long, square jaw, wide, firm mouth, deep-set, humorous kindly eyes; a tall man with a capacious handshake. He looked a unique and commanding personality in kliaki, and has lost no part of his “presence” by putting on a well-cut civilian suit again. As Director of Recruiting, General Geddes was better known to the inner circle of the Cabinet and War Council than to the public. Those who put hjm there to straighten out the muddle caused hv our rapidly changing system of raising men for the army knew his capacity for clear thinking and calm reasoning, and his courage. Such qualities were needed. To-day as Minister of National Service and M.P. he is becoming known as a man of large, broad ideas—one who talks facts and faces them.

There is more than a hint of the professor of anatomy in his speeches. As a professor of that exact science —he filled the chair of Anatomy at. Dublin as well as at Montreal—he has been accustomed to talk and illustrate facts to two and three hundred critical young men at a time; and ask them to draw deductions from those facts. Hence his ability to explain the process whereby the affairs of men and nations get into a tangle, and the obvious steps which must be taken to unravel them. He has studied cause and effect in the most delicately balanced and wonderful machine in the world, the human body. With the calm logic of the East, where his father lived and worked, he can say, “What is, has been; what has been,"will be.” In his dealings with other men he can be courteous to all and firm with all. He has no illusions. To him the war appeals as a many-sided problem involving not merely the surface facts of life and death, victory and defeat, but also the vaster, broader issues of the birth of new empires, the death of old civilisations, the creation of new. ■He is not blind to the sordid side of human nature or the subtler forms of danger which beset a nation at war. His appeal to his recruiting staff to beware of corruption was a word from a man who has known what it is to be assailed by many temptations and has resisted them.