NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19405, 13 August 1926, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

PRELUDE TO DISARMAMENT. " Disarmament is really a moral issue depending on the enlightenment of public opinion, and it is very difficult to solve so long as each country demands guarantees for security and refuses to disarm, so long as there are any unknown factors in superior industrial equipment which, with visible forces equal, might give an advantage to another country," says Mr.' Hugh Spender in the Fortnightly Review. " But the idea that security is to be found in disarmament lias barely begun to penetrate the Continental mind. Hence the necessity of discussion and yet more discussion on this question, for what has to be done is to convince the nations concerned that armaments create those very fears and suspicions which are the cause of war, and that the new order of society which the League of Nations is meant to create, with its appeal ,to reason and arbitration, cannot exist in a world in which the nations are armed with every form of offensive weapon, and refuse t-o consider the limitation or aboli-' tion of any of these forms of destruction." BRITISH BRAINS IN AMERICA. " The American's wonderful and com plete faith in the Briton—in the con tinuity af his virility, in his mental morality and his essential value to civilisation —was more than anything else impressed upon me during a three months' visit to the States," writes Mr. H. G. Saward in the Daily Chronicle. "British stock is predominant in the control of American factories. America is inclined to draw more and more upon British mental capital, to take the refined oil of British capacity and British moral tone, for America frankly realises that the social conscience, the social stamina of the British race, is in a higher state of development than that of any other race she has imbibed and compressed into a new nation. America is seeking to stiffen her polyglot society by greater injections of British 'tone.' ... If we fail to apply the strength of British stock to British industry then America will absorb more British stock, brain and quality—and that would mean the Americo-Anglicising domination of civilisation." THE NEW HOUSING IN ENGLAND. A transformation in the actual living conditions of the people of our great towns is going on, all too slowly, it is true, but yet steadily and progressively, on the fringe of each one of our industrial centres, says a writer in the Spectator. There is not a city in England which has not some sort of a civic housing scheme; and in most places an appreciable part of that scheme is now completed ; the new houses have been inhabited for a few months, and it is possible to begin to measure what has happened. The writer had spent a 'fortnight living in one of the new corporation houses outside a typical English industrial town. The house was one on a new estate which must have had about two or three hundred houses on it. It was not the houses themselves, however, which made this housing estate, and the many others like it, a world perfectly different from anything in the heart of the town.' It was much more the wide spacing of the houses, the well-planned lay-out of the whole estate, the fact that the larger trees ,had been left standing, that each house had its little garden, that the streets were wide and open. It is this element of care and forethought in the planning of the new estates which is making them something new and different from anything else in England. In one sentence, a civilised,* decent life is possible in the new houses and is quite impossible in the old. There is something almost feverish in the way these city workers, transported from their narrow streets into these new estates, are setting about creating their gardens. It is as if the instincts of a peasant origin were awakened by even this tiny plot of land.