NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18689, 21 April 1924, Page 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

ILLITERACY IN ENGLAND.

Writing in the Spectator, Mr. St. John Ervine says there are in Britain many young men and women' between the ages of 16 and 25, who can neither read nor write. "Teachers, when I have discussed this illiteracy before them, have either passionately denied that it exists, or that it exists to any serious extent, and have sometimes accused me of trying to charge them with inefficiency," he says. "I do not think that they are in a position to estimate the extent of illiteracy, because it occurs among people who_ have not been in their charge for some time, and were never in their charge for long; and I am certain that their denials will not be supported by magistrates. The administration of the School Acts was, with the full connivance of the Government, very slack during the war, and thousands of boys and girls were withdrawn from school before they ought to have been, or were allowed to attend so. intermittently that they could not derive any real benefit from the skilful instruction they received. On February 12 last, a youth of 17 was called before the magistrates as a witness in a case heard at Oldbury, near Birmingham. He had been to school, but was unable to read the oath! In on© day, within the past 18 months, in a Court near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, six young men informed the magistrates that they could not read! These are not isolated instances, or anything like isolated instances." Mr. Ervino suggests that illiterates receiving unemployment relief should be required to attend classes in the three elementary subjects.

A GIRDLE OF HONOUR. The extent and the distribution of British war cemeteries were described by MajorGeneral Sir Fabian Ware, in a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts. He said they stretched across France and Belgium in a chain from the English Channel to the Vosges, nearly 1000 in number. In addition there were more than 1500 French communal cemeteries and churchyards, in which some of our dead were buried. In Switzerland there was one cemetery at Vevey, where the bodies of the British prisoners of war who died in that country had been gathered The chain continued across the north of Italy, and there were in that country, together with scattered cemeteries and graveyards, 93 in all. Across Macedonia the chain stretched —here there were 21 cemeteries — the Gallipoli Peninsula, where there were 31 to Smyrna, through Syria, where there were two, through Palestine, passing over the Mount of Olives itself Palestine there were , 40through Egypt, where there were five, to East Africa where there were 400 burial places which it was necessary to concentrate; across the north of India to China, where there was a cemetery at Tsingtao, and 23 other scattered burial grounds, to Australia and New Zealand, across Canada, and back to the United Kingdom, where there were more than 67,000 graves in some 5000 churchyards and cemeteries. Someone writing t>» these cemeteries shortly after the war, had truly said that the Empire had thrown a girdle of honour round the world. There were 50 other countries, off the track he had followed, where British war graves had been found.

ENDURING MEMORIALS. One of the first decisions made with regard to the war graves had been that, so far as was humanly possible, they should be permanent, said General Ware. Perpetuity in sepulture had in the past been very rare, assured in any degree to the great of the earth only. These dead, the Imperial War Conference had held, certainly deserved the honour which had been shown to the former great of the earth. To ensure this lasting quality Had been the special task of the engineer. It was only necessary to visit an ordinary cemetery to see how headstones became displaced. All chance of that bad been prevented in the war cemeteries. A trench was dug at the back of each row and a continuous concrete beam constructed in it. On the upper side of tho beam were sockets into which the headstones wet* fitted and fixed with concrete; they were thus held as in a vice, permanently immovable. The land had been given in perpetuity in each former allied country. There was, therefore, no fear that it would ever be used for s»iy other purpose, but even if that had not been so the labour and expense that would bo incurred in the removal of the headstones and their foundations would economically prohibit the use of the land lor any other purpose. These cemeteries and memorials had been built in honour of our dead; they were at the same time monuments unique in history to the achievements of the British race and the British Commonwealth of Nations, they were in all parts of the Old World, and in that which was nnknown to ancient empires and conquerors, and bore a message to future generations as long as the stone «t which they were constructed endured. If we ask ourselves what that message would be, he thought our pride in the memory of those whom we honoured would be lighted up with an unshaken hope in the ultimate triumph of the faith and ideals in which they died.

PROHIBITION IN AMERICA. Addressing the Pilgrims in London, Sir Auckland Geddes, lately British Ambassador in Washington, referred to the enforcement of prohibition in the United States. He said he thought the people of Britain did not realise at all how strong the feeling of the best minds of the United States was on the subject of prohibition. Given the American problem and given the American climate, he thought that if ho were an American he would be a prohibitionist. There had seldom been a more humiliating position for any British Ambassador than to go week after week requesting the release of some disreputable British — alleged British—schooner or motor-boat engaged in landing stuff which everybody should have been ashamed to land. It was true they obtained the release of those boats and their cargoes, but it was humiliating because those boats, although flying the British flag, were engaged in violating or attempting to violate or aiding to violate tho laws approved by the best minds / and tho best consciences in the United States. He was glad that his last official act in Washington before he delivered his letters of recall was to carry through and sign that Treaty. He knew that there was a good deal of feeling in Britain that it would have been far better to have let this trade go on. He placed the word " trade " in inverted commas, but thgre they had a question that was absolutely pregnant with ill-will, with hostility, with doubt, with distrust—the sort of thing that no man who had studied the question would wish to defend. He hoped that that Treaty would secure early ratification on both sides of the Atlantic. We had to understand the American point of view of prohibition, even if we ourselves had no intention whatever o£ following in the same path.