NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21494, 18 May 1933, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

OUR INHERITANCE

Professor G. M. Trevclyan, in his presidential address at the National Council meeting of the Youth. Hostels Association in London, said: —"If only people would walk across country instead of driving motors along roads, taking the towns with them as they go, then they would not only know in their minds, but fool in their bodies and their hearts that tho country was as much a reality as tho town, and a far better one. The intolerable waste of modern mechanical life, tho grinding, tho dazzle, and tho roar, all seems so unbearable, and then one steps lightly aside, and in the shadow of a green hill or at a great rook hears the sounds and sees the signs that inspired the " Midsummer Night's Dream" and Wordsworth's "Prelude." It is there still to-day—no longer, indeed, everywhere, for the destroyer has been abroad—but it is still there in vast tracks in our own island. Let us reclaim our inheritance." FEAR AND FAITH In a speech on the Indian question, Mr. Winston Churchill spoke of "unrepresentative, thoroughly disloyal, and subversive politicians, who have learned at once to speak English and to hate England." Alluding to this remark, Lord Irwin said:—"No one could deny that there were politicians in India to whom those words were thoroughly fitted, but when ho thought of all the hundreds of thousands of Indians who had collaborated with men of our race in politics, in administration, in all tho arts of peace, to say nothing of tho dangers of battlefields, then he was amazed that any statesman should permit to pass his lips language which seemed so mischievous, so ungenerous and so untrue. That method of approach was not going to assist us in what ought to be our purpose, namely, to approach the question with judicious and impartial judgment. Let ns by all means have our fears," Lord Irwin added. " Nobody who knows anything about India would be without his fears and anxieties. But while we have our fears, we must not let those fears strangle our faith. No great Imperial achievement had been done by Britain except by faitb, and we shall never solve the problem of India unless wo are prepared with our fear to mix great faith." AFTER DEATH "I am a surgeon, and I have seen patients paralysed up to their nocks, with their hearts still beating, and their lungs kept going by the long nerve wire which runs direct down to those bits of machinery from the brain. These people always told me they were the same personality," says Sir Wilfred Grenville, in his book, "Forty Years In Labrador" "Why they should cease to be a person at all because /I nick through one more nerve thread, little thicker than a piece of cotton, I cannot say. Anyhow, until that last nick takes place, a magistrate will accept on oath that the person is exactly the same, though he may bo 'dead' ' below the cervical vertebrae, which means his neck. Everyone knows that the brain is' not ourselves. It is mine exactly as is my jack-knife or my boot. I make one side of my brain learn French. A doctor can destroy the few cells which I have educated, and I know no French. But I can go to work and educate the cells on the other side and learn French again. Everybody can know that rio part of my body is 'l,' only that it and its wires and cells relate mo to this material world. I have seen the accident called-death of the body more than once, but I never saw any reason to believe in the death of personality. Every possible evidence of personal life after death that can come to> human beings I should say comes through other channels than the five senses that I am conscious of." DUBLIN PHILOSOPHY "We have reached a stage in social development in which the feelings of the ordinary man in the street are at once raised to international importance," says the Dublin Review in an article which has the test cricket controversy in mind. "Time was when his feelings were again and again corrected before they played their part in national affairs. They made their way slowly up the several levels of education and classes of society to be mot at the top by opposite feelings arising from different circumstances, and what appeared at tho end as tho expression of the nation's will was something very different from what most individuals as individuals thought. Even to-day something like that happens in all co-opera-tion that is worth-while having. Modern rapidity, and, most of all, the modern press, have made all that impossible.

. . . Au individual can control his temper and his feelings, and his actions for tho most part have little importance in the long run. But once the will of a nation has received public expression it is very hard to go back on it. Palmerston used to give that as the reason why democracies would always fail in diplomacy. Furthermore, the actions of a nation lead to a chain of consequences for the lives of individuals, the end of which no man can see. And yet it seems that nowadays there is na guarantee that the will of the nation will be an improvement on the passing feelings of the individual who happens to take an exaggerated interest in games. On tho contrary, there is every likelihood that it will not. Need we look further for the cause of many of our troubles?"