NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20537, 11 April 1930, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

SOCIAL GULFS IN INDIA. " To-day castes are to be reckoned by the hundred and identifiable minor castes by the thousand," says Sir Charles Morris in the Times' India number. " Caste remains as strongly as ever a matter of birth. A man is born to honour as a Brahman or to dishonour as a sweeper; the worst of Brahmaris cannot lose his sanctity and the noblest of sweepers cannot break his birth's invidious bar, except by going right outside the pale of his religion. . . . There is little difficulty about the precedence of the major castes. Always the Brahman comes first, and then the modern representatives of the three 'twice born' communities. Below them there would be no general agreement as to the sequence. Some Sudras are 'clean'; others, though not clean, are yet not thought, of as polluted. Below these, again, are a descending series of 'untouchables.' The depressed classes are reckoned to number from 50 to 60 millions. They used to be thought of as definitely beyond the pale of Hinduism. Their position is more ambiguous nowadays, when growing tension between Hindus and Moslems makes it important to each community to increase its numerical strength. But if the outcasts are to be reckoned as Hindus it is only just and proper that Hinduism should treat them better. Logic and expediency alike tend to reinforce the efforts already being made by the more generous-minded of the caste, leaders to show more consideration to those beyond the pale. T.he movement has long figured on political programmes; it is now actually gaining strength; but it still has great difficulties to overcome in the shape of orthodox conservatism."

GOLD AND WORLD PRICES. " Ever since the war a growing scarcity of gold has threatened the world with the consequence of a continuous lowering of commodity prices, resulting in a general economic degression," says Professor Gustav Cassel, in a contribution to Lloyd's Bank monthly review. "The amount of new gold required to be provided each year for the purchasing power of gold to be maintained at a constant level increases in proportion to the rapid economic progress of the world, whereas an already insufficient production is expected to be reduced very considerably during the next two decades. The only conceivable means of preventing this calamity is a systematic reduction of the monetary demand for gold. First, the use of gold coins as a circulating medium should be abandoned. Tho second measure for securing economy in the use of gold consists in a reduction of the central banks' requirements of gold reserves. . . . Under the leadership of

the Bank of England this policy has undeniably attained very valuable results, and it seems quite certain that without such deliberate efforts the present, situation would have proved very much more troublesome. . . . During the past year the stability of the world's price level has also been threatened bv the eagerness of some central banks to increase their gold reserves. The Bank of France has accumulated a gold reserve far beyond any sum for which it could under any conceivable circumstances have a practical need. ... it is certain that a better insight into the duties of central banks and a fuller acknowledgment of their true responsibility would have to a great extent prevented the economic depression which we are now witnessing, and which we shall endeavour in vain to overcome until wo secure for the world the fundamental conditions of stable money."

LONDON OF THE ROMANS. Lecturing at the London Institution, Dr. R. E. M. Wheeler, keeper and secretary of the London Museum, said that in trying to reconstruct the great Roman City of London it was necessary to remember that Roman civilian life was, in many respects, more modern, like our own, than that ot any subsequent period, until recent times. It was difficult sometimes to realise that if they were suddenly transported back to Roman London they would feel much more at home there than they would if they were transported to London in the 12th or the 13th century. It was a civilised, comfortable city, with an efficient drainage system and an adequate water supply. There were probably more buildings of stone and brick than at any subsequent period until after the Great Fire of 1666. There were more adequate and attractive facilities for bathing than there were afterwards until the latter part of Queen Victoria's reign. The Roman city surveyor, standing in the midst of his simple street system, would have laughed at our curiously deformed inheritance from the Middle Ages. And our unwholesome custom of burying our dead in little, crowded city churchyards, and even beneath the floors of our temples,, would have revolted the Roman citizen's sense of decency. Perhaps the word " efficiency " brought us most nearly to the ideal for which Roman London stood. It was the efficiency ot Roman Britain that carried it, surprisingly intact, through the age of destruction which followed (and in part preceded) the year 410. The kindly but obstinate German farmers who sailed up the English rivers in the fifth century and filled the countryside with pleasant placenames; the Vikings, perhaps less kindly but no less determined, who followed their example four centuries later, were all mastered by the efficiency of the Roman Britain which they pillaged or even sought to ignore. But when at last they were spurred, for good or ill, into a sense of political responsibility, they were roused suddenly to the fact that Roman Britain was not dead, but merely dormant. Twenty miles of London shipping and an enlarged Watliiig Street still bore witness to the unerring imagination of the Roman founders of modern Britain.