NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21757, 23 March 1934, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

GREEK TRADITIONProfessor Ernest Barker, of Cambridge, spoke at a reception to W.E.A. students at Manchester University on Greek influence in modern politics. Both Plato and Aristotle, he said, emphasised the idea of the community and its claim on the individual, But while Plato's influence had tended to be on the side of the expert, the philosopherking, Aristotle's had been more on the side of the collective intelligence of the masses. Plato had had followers in the modern world stretching, one might say, from Sir Thomas More to Lenin. Aristotle's genius was perhaps particularly congenial to England, at least to the England of the past, and Burke quoted him again and again. The later Stoic tradition passed over into the Roman conception of a universal natural law applicable to all humanity. Dr. Barker concluded by discussing the development in Germany about the time of the French Revolution of the widely different theory of a national law, a national culture, and the sovereignty of the nation, and the consequent gulf between Germany and more Western Europe. NO MORE NEUTRALITY Mr. Wickliam Steed, speaking at a luncheon of the Distributist League in London, warned people against war breaking out suddenly through a surprise decision of the leaders of Nazi Germany. Mr. Steed suggested that Great Britain's policy should bo to claim her share of responsibility for her own security. "We should say first of all to all the Dominions," he said, " that we took the League Covenant and the Kellogg Pact seriously and made them the basis of our policy, and that we felt that under these two instruments the idea of neutrality between nations working for peace had gone. Therefore we gave notice that any attempt to break either would be regarded as a hostile act and we would at once sever our financial and commercial relations with the country. I believe they would all accept within a month, if it were then put up as the united British policy to the other Governments of the world. I am convinced that the United States, France, Italy, Russia, every country in Europe except possibly Germany at first would accept. Then the world would know that the chance of any successful warmaking would grow thin." STATE INTERFERENCE

In a speech in London Sir Andrew McFadyean said there could be no doubt that at the present time everywhere in the world the State was tending to intervene more and more in the control and management, and often in the ownership, of economic institutions. We had Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazidom—the unnatural offspring of a union between Bolshevism and Fascism —Rooseveltry, and in Britain Elliotry, with Tennantry perhaps to come. (Laughter.) All these conditions had been attributed to a stat-e of emergency. It was not possible, he thought, to say how far State intervention in its present intensity would be maintained if and when the world returned to a greater degree of prosperity. He thought, however, they could descry underneath the surface certain very prominent tendencies which led him to believe that for the next 30 years we were more likely to see an intensification of State intervention in one form or another rather than a return to a purer form of individualism of which therfe were still a few apostles like Sir Ernest Benn and Mr. Harold Cox. Competition was by no means as important for economic progress as it used to be. We had learned that unrestricted competition was wasteful. Public control did not necessarily mean Stat-e ownership, although he believed there would be some State ownership as and when particular economic activities took on the character of monopoly. Fortunately, we had evolved an organ from which we could get that measure of control which we desired in the public interest, and even public ownership, while retaining the advantages of capitalist management. He referred to the series of corporations which began with the Port of London Authority, and was extended in the 8.8.C., the Central Electricity Board and the London Transport Board. science' and the soul "I want to see science masters in every school in England taking a much more active part in teaching and preaching religion and ethics," said Sir Arnold Wilson, at a conference of education associations. "I want to see them handing on the spiritual traditions in which nations or bodies of men have been nurtured, interpreting" national and local literature and art in the light of its unalloyed spiritual meaning, and not in the more literal sense associated with the miraculous or the irrelevant. Human aspirations, our own sentiments, our own national feelings and prejudices, have a biological, as well as a social, origin. They are as much realities as are any chemical reactions. One of the main objects of scientific education should be to bring inspiration, strength and inward peace to mankind, and stability to civilisation. Happiness and contentment are not things which result from welfare in any more material or biological sense. Were human society freed by science from all want and disease, it might still be full of misery and crime, unless it were informed with the religious spirit. If natural science is content to deal with mechanical or casual interpretation of our visible and tangible experience, not merely, as J. S. Haldane observes, as a provisional expedient, but as an ultimate truth, natural science will fail to produce an adequate cultural background. The true cultural background is humility arising from a reverence for the Unseen. In tho words of Ecclesiasticus: 'There are hid from us yet greater things than these, for we have seen but few of His works. . The training of children and young people is an organic whole; so far as we are now consciously cutting it up into separate branches, we are depriving children of the cultural background which we seek. A system of education which is secular by essonce, which implies that worship of the Unseen is an act of urfreason, will not endure, and deserves to perish. The only enduring cultural background is unquestioning trust in truth, to believe in it, to search for it, and to follow it; to face #ll facts squarely, and to distinguish between axiom and postulate, theory and practice, assumption and presumption, loyalty to institutions and to ideas worthy of loyalty."