NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21520, 17 June 1933, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

SOVIET DESPOTISM At a demonstration in the Albert Hall, organised by the Westminster Catholic Federation, tlio Archbishop of Liverpool said that London and not Moscow was the birthplace of Communism, and England, not Russia, was its Galilee, for it was in the reading room of the British Museum that Karl Marx made his first studies of economic conditions. Nowadays one came across many young people who were attracted to Communism in the belief that a social experiment in economics was being carried out in Russia, and they said it. ought to.be given a sporting chance. They had the romantic idea that Russia was engaged on the gallant task of making a workers' Utopia, where every one would be more or less poor but perfectly happy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The nearest approach to Soviet Russia the world had ever known was ancient Sparta, with its despotism, its secret police, and its cold-blooded, calculating cruelty. TREATMENT OF CRIMINALS Dr. Maurice Hambliu Smith, who has just retired after 33 years' prison service, speaking at a luncheon of the Howard League for Penal Reform in London, said that psychology must play an important part in the treatment of criminals in the future. Jn the prisons it was not the crime that was being treated but the individuals. ''lhe whole secret," he said, "lies in the patient, intensive investigation of the individual, and I would stress the necessity of making that investigation in future before sentence. Once a man has been sentenced there is always an antisocial grudge which handicaps those responsible for dealing with him. Unless wo use all the resources which are at our hands in modern psychology we are not doing our best for our patients and we are not doing our best for society. 1 have no desire to make pets of criminals. It is because society now, to my mind, is most inadequately protected that I am pleading for a change." CHOICE IN BUYING "The purchaser has lost the habit of, and desire for, choice," writes Mr. Hilaire Belloc in the English Review. "I say that this mental and spiritual disease is more important than the merely mechanical fact of cheap production. Such a statement will sound fantastic in the ears of those who are accustomed, as all modern men are, to implied materialism. Yet here, as in every other department, it is the mind that governs and not the material conditions. . . It is notorious that in certain districts, in certain trades covering great numbers of people, choice is still exercised, and has a great effect. For instance, I would quote the demand for Cheshire cheese among the Lancashire operatives. They know what they want and they insist upon it; tlffcy will not accept, as will men in the south, a substitute or an inferior article. See also the effect of choice as it is exercised, though in a restricted field it is true, by the middle and upper classes in certain categories of furniture and design. Here, as in nearly everything else, tlio right process has been largely reversed; men take what is imposed upon them and not what they themselves choose. Supply controls demand and not demand supply. . . With the exercise of choice, of individual will, of preferring this to that and seeing that you get it, you extend the opportunity for the artisan, the individual craftsman, the man who makes a thing to order or one who employs and personally supervises a few." TURN OF THE TIDE In a recent address Sir Francis Goodenough said he did not wish to be too optimistic, but ho believed the turn of the tide had taken place. We should get slow movement in the first instance, but when the tide began to llow we should reach ultimately, not only in Britain, but throughout the world, a degree of prosperity never before enjoyed by the human race. Capacity for production on economic lines was far greater than it bad ever been before, and it was only because the economic and monetary systems were out of joint that we were prevented from enjoying that production. He believed that before we were very much older we should see production flowing and prosperity coming all over the world. It would not come, however, unless people were prepared to take advantage of it. To be prepared for success in business they had to see that their principles were right. The old saying that business is business had acted as an anaesthetic to conscience in many businesses. What they had to remember was that business was service, and that they must so act as to ensure/ the permanent satisfaction of the customers. They must study the taste, habits, and requirements of their customers, and see everything through the eyes of their customers rather than through their own eyes. They wanted better education for commerce, and better recruiting for employment in order that they could secure the best material. He hoped the recently-formed association for commercial education would do a. great deal to improve the standard of efficiency in business. He. believed that was essential, and to help it. forward would be one of the best things thev could do. Much time and money had been spent upon perfecting machinery, but far too little bad been spent upon those using it or employed in marketing it.