NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21161, 19 April 1932, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

PREPARATIONS FOR OTTAWA. There is much news of preparations, direct and indirect, for the Ottawa Conference. The Board of Trade, says the Times, is essaying, by elaborate tariff schedules, to show each Dominion how it can help the English exporter. So minute is the analysis of production and business that every delegate should know all that is to be known when the conference opens, especially as the opportunity for further examination,is provided by committees in the Dominions. Canada is enlisting the aid of her leading industrialists, and the Canadian Manufacturers' Association has been invited to submit a list of British productions which might be put on the free list. There have been conferences in the past, not of one kind alone, which have failed for lack of digested knowledge. Everybody seems determined that Ottawa shall not be added to this dismal list. THE IDEA OF ONE MAN. "I am not straining a comparison when I say that the man who conceives a project, and sets to work to realise it in factories and warehouses, in trained employees, and in all the other phases of a successful productive enterprise, operates very much as an artist does in painting a picture, and enjoys much the same triumph in achievement," writes Sir George Sutton, Bart., in Great Thoughts. "There are many businesses to-day which did not exist 30 or 40 years ago, save as an idea in the mind of one man. When the builder regards his handiwork —when he pictures the raw materials coming from all parts of the world to feed his machinery; when he thinks of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men and women who gain their living by operating that machinery or distributing the product, would'it be surprising if he feels the same, sort of satisfaction as a painter does, or a musician who has composed a masterpiece ?" WAR DEBT INCONSISTENCIES. To illustrate the inconsistency of the war debts' position, the Hon. Alexander Shaw, chairman of the I'. and O. Steam Navigation Company, quoted a war-time experience. "On the Western Front," he said, "I happened to be the gun officer of a ]sin. howitzer that fired a shell, weighing 16001b., which destroyed a French chateau—as it was intended to do. Now, probably, the shell was paid for from the proceeds of an American loan. As a consequence its explosion created a gold debt duo to the United States of America as well as a reparations debt due from Germany for destruction of French property. If the shell had been fired by an American battery at- the same chateau and with the same purpose America would never have sent us a bill either for the cost of the shell, the use of the gun's crew, or the wear and tear of the howitzer itself. Sensible Americans would never have dreamed of such a thing. But have they not, indeed, done something still more strange, about that shell? They were saved the whole expense of providing the howitzer nnd of paying and feeding the officers and men who worked the gun. But in spite of having been saved all that trouble and expense they charged Great Britain because she put herself lo the cost and trouble of doing all these things." MAN'S SELF-DECEPTION. " We. must be aware," said Canon Lindsay Dewar, of York, in a, recent sermon, " of the, very great danger there is in arguing with our consciences. If v.e do that it was almost as certain as anything could be that we shall end by getting our consciences to fall into line with our wishes. There is a story that illustrates what will happen. A clergyman with a nervous complaint that caused him to wink involuntarily went into a railway station lefreshment room i and ordered a glass of lemonade, winking involuntarily at the moment. The barmaid," misinterpreting the wink, secietlv added something to the lemonade. The clergyman drank it off, and then said: 'That is very good lemonade. I will have another.' That is w hat will happen." The process was known as rationalisation, and rationalisation meant finding apparently good reasons for doing the thing you wanted to do rather than the thing which conscience told you you ought to do. There were people who would not subscribe to foreign missions because, as they said, we ought.first to convert the people at home. We never found such people conspicuous for the support they gave to missions at home. It had been said that man's rationality, of which we were inclined to boast, was only skin deep, and that man's chief characteristic was rather his capacity for self-deception. MINERAL OILS AND CANCER. The Manchester Committee on Cancer is continuing its study of the can-cer-producing properties of mineral oils (such as are used in the lubrication of cotton-spinning machinery) and of the, possibility of removing harmful compounds from these oils without increasing their cost or diminishing their lubricating qualities. The scientific report on the. committee's operations has just been issued. It shows that the synthesising of a cancer-producing substanco from inert organic material has yielded a synthetic tar of such high concentration that a dilution of one part in a thousand of this substance yields tumours in the animals subjected to experiment as numerous as those obtained with shale lubricating oils. Only one. definitely active pure compound has yet been isolated from this tar, of comparatively small power to produce tumours, but it is found that the cancer-producing ability of this compound is very markedly increased by the addition of oleic acid, which accordingly is now regarded with some suspicion as a counter-promoting agent. Attempts are being made to treat mineral oils with sulphuric acid in such a way as to render the oils innocuous, but it is not yet clear that the full benefit of such treatment as demonstrated in laboratory conditions can be derived from the ordinary commercial use of acid. It has been found that a special clay, when used for the purification of marketed shalo oil, reduces the potency of tho oil as a cancerproducer by 75 per cent. Similarly, tho addition of 5 to 10 per cent, of sperm oil to the shale oil reduces its toxic potency by 66 and 75 per,cent., and anhydrous lanolin reduces the potency by 90 per cent. Several experiments with blends of other mineral lubricating oils and sperm oil are in progress, and the indications available are that the sperm oil blend is substantially less toxically active than the control pure mineral oils.