NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20978, 15 September 1931, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

CONTROL OF GAMBLING. " Despite its plans for a grand campaign against lotteries, notably against foreign sweepstakes operating partly in Ihe United States, the Post Office Department is not going to put them out of business. It only thinks it is," says the Now York Outlook. " The best it can hope to do, without spending huge sums of money, is to cut their business down a bit, and then only temporarily. And even if its campaign were completely successful, it would do no good. It would merely divert the attention of chanceloving Americans from this form of gambling to another. How effective the lottery laws will be hereafter may be judged by noting how effective they have been hitherto. For years it has been against the law to import lottery tickets, buy or sell them, send them through tho mails, advertise them or print lists of the winners in newspapers. And what has been the result? Well, Horace J. Donnelly, solicitor of the Post Office Department, himself declares that the playing of lotteries ' has recently grown to such huge proportions in American cities, towns and villages as to border on a national disgrace.' MR. SNOWDEN APPRAISED. An interesting estimate of Mr. Philip Snowden, Chancellor of tho Exchequer in the Labour and the National Governments, was given by Mr. Winston Churchill, his predecessor in the office, in a recent contribution to the Sunday Pictorial. "I always regard him as the lineal successor of my honoured friend John Morley," he wrote. "Ho does not fill his place. In the general decline of our Parliamentary life and institutions he occupies a similar pedestal on the next step lower down. He has all Motley's conviction and more practical grit. He lacks his glamour, his eloquence, his vast erudition. If John Morley was 'Two Pence Coloured,' Philip Snowden is *A Penny Plain.' To-day he is one of our rulers. If we are to have such rulers, we must be glad he is among them. Our happy-go-lucky, debilitated, ungripped, unfocused electorate has known two socalled • Socialist Governments. They have never seen a Socialist Government without Philip Snowden as Chancellor of the Exchequer. When they do, they will find it necessary to take more interest in politics." PLANS FOR PROGRESS. " It might not be a vain idea if statesmen wero to set before the people a series of limited objectives to bo attained in ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years," says the Aberdeen Press. " These objectives could not be reached with absolute accuracy, but the League of Nations might do a great deal worse than appoint an international panel of the world's most distinguished and most humane thinkers to draft ideas of development which they deemed possible of realisation within a given number of years if every nation strove to that end. And then each nation could have its own sub-committee of great minds to suggest, within the limits of the world plan, the regulation of its own destiny. In family life, in science, in war to a certain extent men appreciate a sense of continuity and strive to achieve it. But in international affairs, and to a considerable degree in the affairs of individual States, while we watch things ' broadening down from precedent to precedent,' we tend to allow each precedent to take care of itself. The individual cannot be completely master of his fate. But all mankind working in conjunction can come very near being master of mankind's fate." THE TRANSPORT CONFUSION. "The railway companies provided their own roads, at their own expense. To-day, impoverished by the war, they have to meet tho competition of the motor-car using roads provided by the State. The result is chaos. The solution is co-ordina-tion," says Sir Josiah Stamp, in a preface to a history of transport "from the Ark to the Aquitania," by Mr. W. H. Boulton. Tho author himself says that two things stand out as essential in the well being of transport, and therefore, of tho nation. "Tho first is co-ordination. In some ways this is being effected, slowly it may be, but nevertheless surely. Road, rail, sea and air transport agencies are gradually being drawn together, and this is all to the good. The second thing is an even-handed treatment of all parties by the State. This is by no means easy, for the whole subject is extremely complicated and full of difficulties. Yet it can be done—it must be done, for all forms of transport are needed, for transport is tho circulatory system of tho body politic, and is just as essential to it as tho circulatory system is to the body of every human being, for just as 'tho blood is the life,' so transport is tho life of tho community." RESUSCITATION OF GERMANY. " Economic life in Germany is by degrees slowing down inevitably, and tho problem is to get the trade pulse moving again," said Sir Walter Layton, in an address at tho Liberal Summer School in Cambridge. " Tho situation must lead to rapidly increased unemployment and distress. It is imperative that the Government before the winter should have some real hope that things will improve; otherwise, it is impossible to see how the present Government can remain in power and avoid social disturbance. We have to face pretty drastic changes. We have to be prepared for further moves of the Hoover kind, in both the political and the economic spheres. There can be no re newal of credits to Europo unless peoplp are satisfied there is not going to be a political upheaval and that economic rela tionships are sound. Finally, 1 think there is somo reason to believe something will be done on these lines, because, whatever disturbance and shock have been caused and howover serious the setback to trade recovery has been as a result of this series of events, it is also true to say that the world has had so object lesson in the economic interdependence of nations that it has never had before."