NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20969, 4 September 1931, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

EVOLUTION OF CONSTITUTIONS. The difficulties of introducing constitutional reforms in India were emphasised by Sir John Simon in an address to the Royal Central Asian Society, when he said that the introduction into an Oriental country, with a long history of autocracy, of methods of self-government which had been evolved through centuries of experiment by Western nations for their own people and their own conditions must always bo a momentous and even a hazardous enterprise. The mode of government in any country, East or West, must be the expression of the political instincts of the people concerned, and it was an enormous assumption to make that a particular Western species of government would turn out to be the model and exemplar even for the most progressive peoples of the East. The circumstances and conditions in which the, British political system was evolved were very different from those of India. He was quite convinced that any acceptable system for India and the East must make definite provision for minorities in the actual structure of the Constitution, and that in a way that was extremely difficult to reconcile with majority rule as we understood it. The reason the federal solution held the field in Indian discussions was that a federal basis was absolutely necessary in dealing with a country so large and so varied as India. Ultimate unity could only be attained by allowing the utmost diversity in the various constitutional elements. What he claimed was not the denial of the aspirations of the Indian people, but rather the necessity to take long views. If delay arose it would not be from our desiring delay, but from the nature of the problems to be solved. Federalism was a form of nationalism and he was quite convinced that in the long run it was the form that must be taken in India.

CRIME IN GREAT BRITAIN. "I think it my duty* to state clearly for the knowledge of all that the serious crime of the country is greater to-day than at any time during the last 60 years," said Mr. JoSlice McCardie, in opening the Birmingham Assizes in July. He said he realised more and more that drink had very little to do with the serious crime of the country, and the causes were to be found elsewhere. It was quite true that the number of prisoners grew steadily less, and that the number of prisoners convicted seemed to diminish, but the number of crimes actually committed grew steadily greater. It was vital to remember not only the indictable offences which were delected and prosecuted, but also those which, though detected, were not prosecuted, because the offender was either unknown or could not be arrested. In 1929 the number of indictable offences known to the police was 134,581, an increase of moye than 4000 compared with the year 1928. There had been no increase in the last 60 years in crimes of violence, but there had been a steady increase in housebreaking, shopbreaking, larceny, false pretences and embezzlement, blackmail and, above all, many cases of fraud. Mr. Justice McCardie later said he believed a good deal of the increase in crime was due to the fact that the Courts had been imposing unduly short sentences which did not give prisoners an opportunity of being adequately trained. People who fixed short sentences were not aware of the realities of crime in the country.

ABNORMAL PRICES. Addressing the Institute of Bankers in London recently Professor M. J. Bonn, of Berlin University, said that gold abundance was not responsible for the rise in prices, nor was scarcity of gold the cause of their decline; in fact, from 1924 on, the decline of prices in England and in the United Stales and the growth of monetary supplies represented a strongly inverted ratio. They all knew that war scarcity and war inflation were the causes of the phenomenal rise in prices in 1914-20. It really was not astonishing that the return to a normal currency sys tem and to peace conditions of production should at last bring about a swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. What had been wrong in men's general attitude was not that some of them considered inflation unhealthy though pleasant and deflation healthy but painful, while others took an opposite view, but that the opponents of deflation considered the period of 1922-28 a perfectly normal time. There was no reason whatsoever to assume that the price-level of 1922-28 was the ideal price- level, from which all development had to start. It was a travesty of history to assume that they had normal prosperity in 1922 to 1928. The collapse of European currencies made the United States the treasury house of the world; it made them prosperity mad; the invasion of the Ruhr gave British industries an unexpected lift; the British coal strike enabled German industry to reach a kind of false prosperity and to continue over-produc-tion. The world in general, notwithstanding the much-advertised economic miracle in the United States, was uneasy all the time, and had not recovered its balance yet. The world had never been normal since 1914, and it would take a good deal of suffering yet until its health was regained.