NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18552, 9 November 1923, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

INEQUALITY OP SEXES.

The suggestion that the sexes are naturally equal lias lately been discussed by Mr. Julian Huxley, who explains that it is a fallacy, because scientific research has disclosed fundamental differences. He says that from the moment of fertilisation onwards, man and woman differ hi every cell of taeir body in regard to tho number of their chromosomes—those bodies which have been shown to be the bearers of heredity, the determiners of our characters and qualities. Of course the hereditary constitution can alter, but any considerable alteration of the hereditary constitution is an affair of millennia, not of decades. The physical differences between the sexes in man (quite apart from those that are part of tho primary sex difference) are, though not great, yet distinct enough. Size, bod ; ly proportions, amount of bone and hair, voice, shape of extremities— secondary sexual characters are definite enough. As to tho mental differences, Mr. Huxley says the physical brain with which the animal is endowed is sexually neuter, blank; and in it the secretions of the distinctive glands pick out and bring into action the nerv-paths appropriate to females and males respectively. The differences Chen are considerable; so cor siderable that they can never permit of the simple equivalence of the sexes. On the other hand, the superstructure of intellectual and practical life is potentially tho same in both sexes. But it is temperament which in the long run decrees what we shall make of our intellects, and in temperament there is and will benot for centuries but for biological periods— fundamental average difference between the sexes. EVENING CLASSES IN LONDON. Those cynics who suggest doubts whether English people have any desire for education may be invited to study the records of the evening classes carried on by the London County Council Education Department, says the Daily Telegraph. To take ono of these courses of instruction demands some sacrifice of leisure. Almost every one of the students must have a day's work to do for his living before he comes into the classroom. We have to assume, therefore, that tho vast majority are inspired by an effective faith that education is worth pains and trouble, whether for its own sake or as a me. ns of livelihood. There were 114,000 young people attending these evening classes last session, and the number of hours put in by each student was greater than ever before. It must be admitted that this record testifies to a vigorous intellectual life in the younger generation of Londoners. The courses of instruction provided by Che L.C.O. are many and various. No important London trade, we are told, is forgotten in the scheme, but while this technical training is earnestly pursued, there is marked increase in the demand for general education. There are here plain signs of a widespread ambition for a higher and more liberal culture. We hold it to be of the first importance to the future of tho nation that such ambitions should be encouraged. Success and prosperity can bo won in the field of economic activity only by a race whose intellectual powers have been developed to the utmost. NoC only high technical efficiency, but thought, imagination, and a high pressure of mental energy are needed. For the training which produces these qualities we must depend in large measure on the evening classes. THE WORLD'S CAPITALS. Dr. Vaughan Cornish has directed attention to the fact that an imperial capital is "usually either a storehouse or a far-reaching' crossways near a storehouse, seldom a stronghold," and that it usually occupies a forward rather than a central site. Dr. Cornish demonstrates this principle from China, Japan and India, the Middle East, Europe and America, with special reference to Constantinople and the cities of Great Britain. Madrid is a notorious exception to this rule, hut he observes that the period since Philip 11. transferred his capital from Toledo to Madrid in 1560 is "nearly coincident with the decline which has reduced Spain from the rank of a Great lower." Washington, he thinks, has continued to bo a suitable capital because it has a forward position facing Europe, though not so perfectly typical a site for a capital as New York but its founders did not foresee the rapid," colonisation of tho West, or they would have sought a more central position. Dr. Cornish has also observed that under the early Pieman Empire the iron tier of civilisation, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, corresponded with the isotherm of 48.5deg. Fahrenheit. No ancient city of any importance had an average temperature of less than 48.5deg. The Japanese did not colonise Hokkaido, which had a lower temperature than that; nor did the Romans for long persist in occupying Britain beyond the CarlisleNewcastle line with its average temperature of about 48deg. Now, tho isotherm in question coincides with the northern limit of vine cultivation, and almost everywhere, except in what is now Northern England, the inhabitants of the frontier districts made wine. Thus the ancient civilisation was distinctly a winedrinking civilisation; the outer barbarians had to be content with coarser liquors, such as beer, mead or spirits distilled from grain until they could summon up courage enough to attack and overwhelm their southern neighbours. CLASSES IN DEMOCRACY. Reviewing the progress of democracy in the United States, Mr. Heinrich E. Buchholz says that in the history of the American people the vital maxim, " Uuited we stand, divided wo fall," has twice been threatened, once when the secession of tho South nearly split the nation up into States, and was only thwarted at the cost of tho Civil War, and now again by the action of the " mugwumps," who are disintegrating tho nation into inharmonious groups and classes on the basis of race, religion and mentality, and denying to tho so-called common people the capacity for selfgovernment. Ho defines a mugwump as a man " who, because of real or imagined superiority, separates himself from the group with which ho has been associated." The Ku Klux Klan are raue-and-religion mugwumps, trying to profit dishonestly by denying fair play to negroes, Jews and Catholics. Certain educationists may be described as mentally mugwump who would like to classify the people according to intelligence tests and penalise those who score low. Finally, there is the "'uplift" mugwump, who would broik up the nation on pseudomoral tests. In fact, on all sides Mr. Buchholz sees an attack on the " common people" who form the I \ilk of the American nation, and thus indirectly on the nation itself, for which union is strength. Nor is his indictment applicable only to the United States, says a writer in the London Spectator. The problem of democracy is, and always has been, to combine the rule of 'be many and the rule of tho best; and it will "be done by making the best use of all common qualities rather than by striving to eliminate what is " common" by racial, intellectual or moral ,tests, which may turn out not to be aristocratic at all, but merely mugjwunipish. In point of fact it is much easier to sec where the mugwumps are wrong than fo meet what is, after all, a real difficulty in the democratic ideal. Nevertheless, if Demos is sometimes a problem, the mugwump is always a nuisance.