NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20901, 17 June 1931, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE COST OF ARMAMENTS., "Great Britain is the only country in the world that has made any serious attempt in the post-war years to reduce her expenditure on armaments," says Mr. George Glasgow, in the Contemporary Review. "How many people in Great Britain know what they are spending on armaments ? A British subject who earns say £SOO a year and pays say £SO a year in income tax, pays £6 of that tax on account of present armaments ai;d £25 of it to pay for past armaments. Every time the clock ticks a second we spend £4 on armaments. We spend more than £2OO a minute, nearly £300,000 a day on armaments. That is the situation in the only country in the world that has tried to limit its expenditure on preparing for the next war. Concurrently Great Britain pays more than any other country toward the expenses of the League of Nations, toward the organisation which, in theory, is the alternative to the next war. The League costs us, not £4, but less than £d a second."

DEGREES OF IMPORTANCE. " One way or another tho feeling has taken hold of the avorago man that he is not infportant. The only important people are those "who do the unusual and the spectacular thing. This idea is cutting the nerve out of a lot of our living. The idea itself needs to be killed down to the roots," says the Inquirer. "Modern civilisation has sadly inverted the real values. It has failed to see tho importance of the average. There is something there to challenge our thinking. We do not get as good work done in the world as wo ought to get done, simply because we treat the average people as being of no importance. To mass all mankind together in a single lump as though one life were the exact reproduction of another—this is the great modern heresy. To be fluent in talking about humanity and to be averse to talking with men is where we err. A working man once said to William James, 'After all, there is very little difference between one man and another, but what there is is very important.* It is just that little difference between one man and another that makes all the difference in the world. It is that difference which makes life worth living, work worth doing, and gives to everything a new meaning. -•

A CENTURY OF SURGERY, On the centenary of the death of John Abernethy, the famous surgeon of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, an address was delivered by Sir Arthur Keith, in the course of which he said that in Abernethy's time the professional medical stu'dent evolved from tho apprentice, and with that change the modern medical schools of London came into existence. The medicine and science of which Abernethy was proud bad been overwhelmed. On tho day of his death his ideas wore being doomed and his puzzles and problems were on tho way to solution. In 1831 Pasteur was a lad of nine, while Lister, a boy of five, was at Epping. Between them they made the modern medical student in his first year wiser than Abernethy was after 40 years of experience. When he died the men weie already living who changed all his teaching about reproduction; ho knew neither the ovum nor the part played by spermatozoa. We could never look at tumours as he looked at them; the microscope had altered our conception of all kinds of tissues —normal and abnormal. What had happened to Abernethy's discoveries would happen to all of ours, great or small though our discoveries might happen to be. But there was one side of a man's nature which could never grow old—never pass out of date or fashion. That was his character. Abernethy as a man would never be out of date.