NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19891, 9 March 1928, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

CARELESS PEDESTRIANS.

"It is quite true that tho average pedestrian is careless; a very large number of street accidents, as every motorist knows, are directly caused by the unwariness or stupidity of foot passengers, says the Saturday Review. "But to blame them for the increasing totals of fatalities is to put the car before the man with a vengeance. This is to make (lie machine rather than the human being the basis of the problem. Pedestrians are not more careless than they were; probably, as they adapt themselves to changed, inore hazardous conditions, they arc slowly becoming less careless. It is cars, not carelessness, that are increasing, and it is cars, not carelessness, that constitute the main problem. If traffic increases and the carelessness of pedestrians remains the same, or only very slowly and slightly decreases, the question confronting the authorities is to devise means for accommodating the machine to tho man. THE INDIAN COMMISSION. Commenting on the departure of the Simon Commission for India, the Times observed that it is improbablo that the initial boycott of the commission will last long, though it may prevent its members from establishing contact with import taut sections of Indian opinion during their present preliminary visit. It cannot prevent them from getting into touch with tho co-operating elements, Moslem or Hindu, or from familiarising themselves by personal observation with tho spirit and the procedure of the Indian Parliaments, and generally from preparing for the formal constructive work which awaits them next winter. Ibcy will have much to study and much to plan during their stay of two months. It is possible they will be able to pie pare a scheme for co-ordinating their future activities with those of the Indian Central and Provincial Legislatures which will satisfy tho less fanatical non-cu-operators. It is certain that they will qualify themselves for their eventual function-that of raporteurs in the Geneva sense-all the more successfully since they have behind them the full moral support of the two Houses and of the three parties of the realm.

AN EDUCATED MAN. Defining democracy as a form of societv, in which every man and woman was working at something for the common good, and yet had time and energy to spare for other things besides gaining a livelihood, Dr. C. Delisle Burns, in an address to the Workers' Educational Association in Glasgow, expressed the opinion that only democracy can produce an edacated man. The first characteristic of an educated man was that he could use the tools of civilisation. He was not thinking so much of chisels and saws as of boots and hats, motor-cars and trams. Of all the tools of civilisation, tho most important that civilised man could use was language, which was embodied in books; therefore they rightly valued books. An educated man was a person who was able to see what was to be seen, hear what was to be heard, and so on somebody who was alive, at least partially alive, for most of us were lialf-dead. Tho man who was able to see had some competence to observe that there were music and painting and poetry in the world. He could not call auy man educated who was not a social animal. He must not be a bore, neither must he be of too plain speech. The educated man could mix freely with his fellows, but a man could not do that so long as there were barriers which separated the man who worked from the man who thought. These barriers would only disappear in a democracy.

THE SPREAD OF EDUCATION. " The Times has been printing a diverting correspondence on the mistakes of popular novelists. With them we are not concerned. Many novels are just one long mistake," says the Schoolmaster. " But among the contributors was a police constable, who wrote an extremely well-written letter. The same evening another journal drew attention to this letter aqd took the opportunity of politely doubting whether a policeman could have written it. How slow some people are in learning that the schoolmaster has been abroad for a few years now, and that except in cases of mental disability or wilful parental neglect, we shall soon have no uneducated classes. The young man who delivers my morning paper speaks with perfect accuracy, and even a little polish. My barber persists in discussing literature with me. There is a finb dictionary on a shelf in his saloon, and he is making himself a good French scholar at a continuation school. He proposes to take a Continental holiday this year. The comic papers and the theatres will have to abandon the ' humour * to be extracted from linguistic blunders and pretentious phrasing. Even at present they seem limited to the ' charlady ' and the plumber. The suggestion, if seriously intended, that the letter in the Times was too good to b6 written by a mero policeman is a splendid unsolicited testimonial to the spread of education."