NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19195, 8 December 1925, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

MISSIONS TO THE HEATHEN. " We don't believe the heathen are in any risk of hell in the literally penal sense. God is love and won't condemn men and women because of ignorance, saiil the Rev, Leyton Richards in a le cent, speech. " The heathen are in the midst of a real and terrible hell here on oart.ii due to the pagan conditions, the fears and superstitions of paganism, the crudities and cruelties of the social life which are part and parcel of the pagan order of society. It is the task of the Christian evangelist to spread the light, of the Gospel in order that these people may be redeemed from a very real and tangible hell upon earth." A SURFEIT OF PLEASURE. " The listlessness of people is a very curious feature of the present time, said Mr. G. K. Chesterton in a recent talk with Mr. Harold Begbie, recorded in the London Observer. "It seems to me that this pleasure-mad generation has lost the art of enjoyment. In my own childhood a treat was a great event ; it stood out from a background of duties, discipline and general uneventfulness. It, was a consequence extraordinarily delicious when it came. Tt stirred the waters of routine. And because one lived in such an atmosphere one was always expecting something marvellous to occur, like Uncle Jehosophat suddenly descending from the ceiling. But nowadays you hear children comparing cinema with cinema! } es, indeed. Such a childhood is almost inconceivable to men of our years. It seems to me that people have found out that certain things give them pleasure, and go on doing those same things until they become tiresome and even torturing. It is as if a persca who admired the colours in a picture splashed those same colours all over the, wall on which the picture was hung. Such people, it seems to me, have discarded as old-fashioned the instincts by which our fathers found their way to enjoyment and have invented a psychology of enjoyment with, apparently, very distressing results." INDUSTRIAL COUNCILS. A brief account of the operations «f industrial councils was given by representatives of the association of those organisations to the British Committee on Industry and Trade. The witnesses stated that in the industries in which joint industrial councils were established disputes had been very rare., the atmosphere created by the constant meeting of employers and workers tending to difficulties being reasoned out round the conference tabie. Though a number of industrial councils had from various causes been disbanded or were not at present functioning, there were at present 50 councils and 17 interim committees, apart from the Government joint industrial councils, actively functioning in various trades. Several cases of weakness were indicated by the witnesses. One was that the time of some councils was occupied wholly, or almost so, with wages questions, other important matters affecting the well-being of those engaged in the trade being disregarded, a.s a consequence of which such a council never had an opportunity of properly justifying itself. Another was that insufficient financial support was given to a council by the industry concerned, the result being that its field of operations and usefulness, particularly in research work, was very strictly limited. The main weakness was, however, inability to enforce decisions, members of councils considering it a waste of timo to attend meetings, often at great inconvenience, when their decisions might not, and often would not, be carried out by unorganised firms. As a result of that weakness in the Whitley scheme, the association had promoted the Industrial Councils Bill, which was designed to secure the establishment of more councils, especially in the larger industries, there being provision for a neutral person, the Minister for Labour, to suggest the formation of a council in every industry where practicable. BRITISH INDUSTRIES. An interesting forecast of the development of British industry was recently presented by a writer in the Westminster Bank Review. He states that when, in the nineteenth century, Great Britain accepted the status of being the "world's workshop," relying for four-fifths of its food supplies on imports from overseas, it "agreed by implication to carry the principle of international specialisation to its logical end should the need arise." The need has arisen. Many nations are discovering that the cruder industrial processes can be carried on more or less successfully .on their own soil and with their own resources. These industries are, largely of the. "heavy" variety, and comprise coal, iron and steel and the cruder textile fabrics. The future of such industries may consequently lie mainly with those countries possessing tha necessary power, raw materials and adequate cheap labour. Britain may therefore find it necessary to concentrate more and more on advanced processes, a tendency that had already become apparent in the years immediately preceding the war. The theory is tested with reference to the iron and steel and the cotton industries. The imports and exports of iron and steel and their manufactures show that if the present trend is continued Britain will become on balance an importer of iron and steel. Imports already tend to be chiefly of the cruder classes of iron and steel products and exports of the more finished classes. In engineering, which represents more advanced specialisation in industry, the volume of exports is more than seven times that of imports, and is rapidly increasing. In the cotton industry competition has been chiefly in the coarser grades, which can be turned out by cheap labour in India, Japan and China. Throughout the post-war depression, Lancashire spinners of the finer counts of yarn, using Egyptian cotton, were appreciably better off than their colleagues in the American section. Given that satisfactory progress in technical skill is made along the lines indicated, British industry need have no fear as to tho future.