NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21414, 11 February 1933, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

TARIFF PRINCIPLES "The most useful action the approaching World Economic Conference could take would probably bo to lay down certain principles in the light of which each country would undertake to re examine its own tariff system," says Sir Arthur Salter, in an article in tho Yale Review. "The most important of these would be a clear explanation, and explicit condemnation, of the 'compensatory' or mis-called 'scientific' principle of making a tariff equal to the difference of costs at home and abroad. Trade is based upon exactly this difference, and the compensation for the difference by tariff is destructive of the very foundation ' upon which trade rests. The right principle, granted a protective system, is to protect only those industries which have some natural advantages, not (as under the compensatory principle) to give higher protection in direct proportion to an industry's unsuitability or incompetence. There is no substantial movement for free trade; but there is a very strong movement in many parts of the world toward the removal of the most expensive and injurious forms of protection and for reciprocal reduction by negotiation. And tho most substantial results will be attained by utilising these existing movements and forces.". THE MUSICAL SENSE Describing music as a purely human faculty. Sir Walford Davies, in an address to members of tho London Head Teachers' Association, urged that they should break down any idea that music was specialised and set up in its stead the commonplace idea that, it was a purely common product. He said he was waiting expectant that science would bring to them two or three bits of news before they died. One was that all sense impression was vibratory; that when one smelt a rose it was a music of the Bouse. Perhaps scientists would tell them that the senses of smell, taste, touch, hearing, and sight were all vibratory experiences in which certain delights recurred in their experience. However it might be, he would be satisfied if they it clear that music was from first to last human. He deprecated the separation "of music from the other arts. Ho supposed every scientist would wish all the millions of children in the world to be trained tip to familiarity with the spectrum, and he thought that musicians must be longing for every child to be brought up, in these days of wireless possibility, with a complete familiarity with "the musical spectrum." It was not a learned thing; it was simply this—that tho ratios could be written on paper, and in the world of tone they could be experienced. They could taste them with their, oars. NO PARTIAL SOLUTION Much attention was attracted by a speech delivered in the United States Senate early Inst, month by Mr. W. E. Borah. "To tell you the truth," he declared at one point, "1 care very little about debts in comparison with the restoration of markets for the farmer, with the restoration of world trade and with the achievement of monetary stability." For his part, if a programme cbtild lie offered which would open markets, adjust monetary difficulties and reduce armaments, he would be willing to consider debts as part of it. Mr. Borah spoke al. length of the burden of debt which the Great War had laid upon the human family; of the appalling shrinkage of world trade; and of the millions of tons of shipping now idle. "Since 1929 Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria and Hungary had decreased their purchases in the United States by 60 per cent. Moreover, 32 nations had been forced to abandon the gold standard, and the United States was paying a high premium for its continued observance. "There is no hope," he said, "for tho American farmer to recover his share of world trade and to get back his farm so long as he has to compete with nations producing tho same commodities and selling them in depreciated currencies." The burden of Mr. Borah's speech was insistence that until reparations had been wiped out, monetary stability had been achieved, silver had been "given back" to the Orient, and armaments had been reduced, there could be no hope of recovery. His personal willingness to include discussion of foreign debts as part of so all-embracing a programme he asserted more than once, and each time with a vigorous reminder that . neither cancellation of reparations alone, nor of debts alone, nor readjustment or a moratorium in the case of either, would bring the world back to normal prosperity. DISCIPLINE ' AND UTILITY The teaching of foreign languages was surveyed by Lord Eustace Percy, in his presidential address to the Modern Language Association. He said the obvious weaknesses of English higher education, and so no doubt, also much of its concealed strength, lay in the apparent English inability to conceive any subject of the curriculum as an efficacious discipline. Our sense of practical utility was always breaking in. As between what the French would call the two main "disciplines" of secondary education, science and languages, there was this great difference —that in the teaching of science the conflict between discipline and utility, between pure and applied science, must or less acute, but in modern languages, on the contrary, discipline and utility were practically identical. The revival of -languages as the basis of higher education seemed to have been greatly hindered by failure to recognise that fact. Interest in modern language teaching had grown with the revolt from the study of ancient languages, and in that, revolt we were in danger of failing to apply to modern language teaching; the main principles which the Western world worked out for centuries in the teaching of ancient languages. It was obvious that, there was a much greater intellectual discipline in written translation or composition than in any conversational use c-f language. It had, however, perhaps escaped attention that there was also an infinitely greater practical utility for the vast majority of people iri being able to read and write a foreign language than in being able to talk it. The first aim of secondary education in languages should be to impart to the student both the ability to read the language and a taste for its literature. The working in of the reading matter of modern language courses with the rest of the curriculum was, he believed, something very like the key to a real revival of languages as the central .subject of higher education.