NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20521, 24 March 1930, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

"THE NAVY IS US." Misgivings regarding the proceedings of the Labour Government in connection with the Naval Conference were expressed recently by Mr. Stanley Baldwin. However, he added: "We do take some comfort in a declaration made by the Prime Minister the other day when he gave expression to a sentiment with which we are in full agreement, but which, coming from the party which ho leads, is the first time such an utterance had ever been made: 'The Navy is us.' I cannot resist, in the presence of Lord Salisbury, quoting a few words uttered more than three centuries ago by a distinguished ancestor of his, who put in a rather longer phrase the sentiment just uttered by the Labour Prime Minister of England: 'The Kingdom of England cannot be assailed from Spain or the Low Countries except by sea, and therefore Her Majesty's special, and most chief defence must be ships.' That is bred into the bone of the British people. That is why on all questions of naval disarmament —come as naval disarmament must and will—there is a peculiar sensibility among our people, people whose advent int<? these islands was only made by crossing the seas, frojn whose coasts they watched for centuries to see the arrival of their enemies and to defeat them: the seas across which our own sons have gone into every corner of the world, taking with them their traditions of freedom and liberty, that island in which, whether the wind blows from the west or "the east, there is not a corner of it in which the salt is not blown into our' nostrils. The Navy, indeed, is us, and when we discuss naval matters we are touched far beyond our intellect; we are touched in the depths of our sentiment and of our hearts."

RADIUM AND CANCER. A complete centre for radium treatment and investigation lias been established in connection with the Westminster Hospital. It contains the radium "bomb" room equipped with the apparatus devised for employing the four grammes of radium entrusted to the hospital by the National Radium Commission for the purpose of ascertaining the precise value of the mass irradiation of deep-seated growths. The new department was recently opened by Lord Lee of Fareham, a member of the commission, who said extravagant hopes, and sometimes absurd fears, were attached to so powerful a weapon as a fourgramme "bomb" of radium. Some people imagined that every one aSlicted with a malignant disease like cancer would be cured if only they could come within range of its beneficent rays. It afforded great hopes in certain limited directions, but did not at its present Stage warrant any extravagant optimism. On the other hand, nothing could be more dangerous than an indiscriminate use of radium. The idea that radium ought to be as much a part of the equipment of a general practitioner as his scalpel was perfectly fallacious. He hoped his words would reach the minds of philanthropic people who might spend money on buying radium and handing it to the general practitioner. He could not imagine a more disastrous course to patiejit and practitioper, or anything more calculated to give a set-back to radium therapy. The commission was exercising very great caution in distributing the radium entrusted to it. In its view the paramount need was not the supply of additional quantities of radium, but the addition to the number of people capable of using radium properly. So long as his present colleagues constituted the commission they would concentrate their main effort for some years on the promotion of education and training in the use of radium rather than on its wide distribution. With that object ifl view they were seeking to set up in London for the convenience and use of Great Britain a centre for post-graduate training in. radium therapy, a point which hitherto had been neglected. When the necessary preliminaries were completed they would allocate a considerable proportion of their limited supply of siational radium for the purpose of organising postgraduate instruction on a scale to serve the entire country. { THE PREVENTION OF WAR. Addressing the Royal Society of Arts, Sir Thomas Holland, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Edinburgh University, proposed that the signatories to the Pact of Paris should prohibit the export of mineral products to any nation which violated the multilateral treaty. The scheme could be initiated, he said, by agreement between the British Empire and the United States, which between them owned some two-thirds of the known workable deposits of minerals and commercially controlled ,: some three-quarters of them. During the war those who were responsible for our mineral supplies were made painfully conscious of the circumstance that not even the resources of the whole Empire were sufficient, in variety or in quantity, to meet the ultimate military demands; and a post-war review of

the Empire's resources, undertaken in the hopo of finding it to be self-contained, soon proved the hope to be futile. No single country was self-sufficient as regarded the variety and quantity of the mineral resources that were required, either for the maintenance of civil activities in peace time, or therefore, for meeting the much greater requirements of war. Some instrument of prohibition was needed as simple as taking away the sparking plugs of the road-hog motorist without damaging his car; something that could temporarily paralyse the most powerful navy, if necessary, without interfering with trade, or otherwise damaging the fleet; some embargo so obviously effective that no nation would even attempt mobilisation. It would bo a rash venture for any Power to undertake war if either the British Empire or the United States refused to permit the export of minerals to it; and any country that attempted to break the Pact of Paris would be paralysed if those two agreed to withhold mineral supplies. He suggested, therefore, that each country should add a simplo rider to the Kellogg treaty, giving its Government the power, if and when necessary, to prohibit the export of mineral products to any country that broke the peace with any other member of the Pact. The very existence of any such power would be, in itself, sufficient automatically to enforce submission of the matters in dispute to the International Court of Justice.