NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18690, 22 April 1924, Page 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE BEST PHYSICIAN. The suspicion has long been growing that many, if not most, remedies act, not by killing the disease, but by stimulating the patient to fresh efforts on his own behalf, says the medical correspondent of the London Times. It was formerly held that X-rays killSd the cancer itself, directly. But the .vork of Murphy and others shows that, '•.© far, at any rate as the skin cancers of mice are concerned, the effect is on the mouse and not on the tumour. Thus, if the tumour is removed and the mouse given a dose of X-rays, it becomes exceedingly difficult to "re-implant." In the case of mice not so treated, re-implantation is comparatively easy. Again, ; f the tumour after removal—instead of the mouse 's subjected to the rays it can be re-im-planted without difficulty; as Professor Meakins, writing in Medical Science, says: —"In 50 mice the grafts from the cancers X-rayed outside the body grew as rapidly as the untreated cancer, and in some cases more rapidly." Apparently, then, the body possesses some cancer-destroying power of its own which is not usually exercised, but which can be set into activity by X-rays. Or, possibly, the rays affect the body cells in such a way as to make them resistant. In any case great interest attaches to the discovery, which confirms once more the view that the body itself is its own best physician.

THE PEOPLE AND THE LAW. .Lecturing in London on the origin and development of law in relation to civic life, Lord Justice Atkin said the Legislature was not always able to express its views with transparent lucidity, and questions of grave difficulty arose in the interpretation of statutes. To the extent to which the Judicature had to determine those questions, ind sometimes — if one might respectfully say make sense of an Act of Parliament, the Judicature had, no doubt, developed the law. Good drafting depended much upon a knowledge of the conditions to which the legislation had to be applied, and upon a lively imagination which would point out the difficulties and changes that were likely to arise if a particular provision were enacted by Parliament. Although the Judges might act upon established principles and develop law, they had no power of changing the law. The real source of change and reform was legislation. The only way to secure legislation was by an enlightened public opinion. They could not expect to secure an enlightened public opinion capable of form : ing a proper judgment on the changes in the law unless the public took an intelligent interest in the law. It was of the greatest public importance that members of the public should understand the law and respect it. Nearly 300 years ago it was said by a great philosopher that "without law, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." He thought every one of those epithets would be found to be justified by modern instances if they turned their "minds to countries where, for practical purposes, there wjis no law. Law, and the maintenance of law, were of the essence of the good-being of a State, and there could be no real maintenance and respect for law unless there was a conscious and intelligent appreciation of it on the part of the public.

TALK ABOUT IDEALS. A disconcerting sign of the times, in the opinion of Dr. L. P. Jacks, is the flagrant disproportion that now exists between the enormous amount of idealistic propaganda, both spoken and written, and the inconsiderable difference that it seems to make in the actual conduct of mankind. In other times, in the early ages of Christianity, for example, a profound change in the, life of Europe was effected by an amount of propaganda, quite small when compared with that which pours from the Press and the pulpit of our day, and with a literary equipment of far narrower range. How is it, one may well ask, that the idealisms of our time, with their immense literary equipment, and the apparatus of publicity working at high pressure, leave us all standing morally pretty much where we were? How is it that all this propaganda of idealism, instead of leading to action on a corresponding scale, leads mainly to more propaganda of the same kind, books breeding books, one formula for mending the world giving rise to another, while the world remains essentially unmended all the time? Is it that we are less in earnest? Is it that our moral energies are so used up in talking about our ideals that none is left over for giving them effect? It it that the ideals themselves have become so cheapened in the process of " discussion " and worn so thin by being used as the counters of argument that the motive power has gone out of them Is it that the modern world has unconsciously accepted the discussion of ideals, and the elquence to which this gives rise, as & sufficient substitute for the effort to act up to them? Or is it, finally, that ideals have been talked about so much and so long that the world at. large has become thoroughly bored both with the ideals and tho idealists? Whoever could answer these questions would throw light on one of the most perplexing phenomena of our time.

LABOUR AND UNEMPLOYMENT. " The Labour Party is the only party that has a positive remedy for unemployment," was one of the claims made in the manifesto issued by the Labour Party in Britain during the last election campaign. There was a debate in the House of Commons recently in the course of which Mr. Stanley Baldwin twitted the Government with the inconsistency and ambiguity of the ideas on the subject expounded .by various Ministers, and finally urged it to proclaim its " positive remedy," promising the support of Parliament and blessings on the party's name if it could cure unemployment. He was followed by Mr. T. Shaw, Minister for Labour, who delivered a long account of the various measures for the financing of schemes to provide employment, along the lines developed by the previous Government. Concluding his speech, Mr. Shaw said:—" This question ""of unemployment was far above party politics. Every Government department had been instructed by the Cabinet immediately to prepare every possible scheme of useful work in order that employment might be accelerated. The Minister for Health had a big housing scheme which was now being negotiated with the builders and the material makers.- Every avenue of providing useful work would be explored. They would not dig trenches to run water through simply for the purpose of spending money, nor would they embark on wild cat schemes. -They would try to find schemes to employ workers' at their own trade. In a country like ours, where our very life's blood was export and import trade, obviously the only remedy for unemployment was the restoration of our foreign trade. On the pacification of the world depended absolutely the livelihood of the people of this country, and to that pacification the Government were devoting all their energies, and not without results. They had made peace with Russia, and they hoped to make peace with the rest of Europe. Unless we could get our foreign markets going again all they could do was more or less to alleviate the suffering." Reports of the debate state that this portion of Mr. Shaw's speech was frequently punctuated with ironical cheer>