NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21765, 3 April 1934, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

AIR RESERVES "At 11.30 a.m. five 'planes taken off the London-Paris air service were lined up at the Le Bourget aerodrome," says the Evening News of London. "Five French Army airmen and a staff of mechanics took them over, flew them to Chartres military aerodrome, and within an hour had transformed them into efficient bombing 'planes. We need not ask why tho French Government has chosen this auspicious moment to stage such a prettily significant demonstration. Enough that the demonstration must banish any lingering doubt in any reasonable mind that a nation with an extensive commercial air fleet is to all intents and purposes a nation that can put its hand on a formidable war fleet when it wants it." CRIME PREVENTION Major W. T. Conder, general manager of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, who was formerly governor of Pentridge ]>enal establishment and Inspector-General of Prisons in Victoria, declared to the Sydney Legacy Club that reform of tho confirmed criminal was almost impossible, and that the only way to reduce criminality was the inculcation of moral principles in children. Ho suggested that if a Government wished to do anything toward prison reform, it should spend the money in tho kindergartens. Weak mentality and a warped form of vanity were characteristic of most criminals. Ho doubted whether more than one or two per cent of the confinees in gaols were normal mentally. Their vanity was betrayed by the frequency with which their pockets were found stuffed with newspaper clippings recording their misdeeds. There were only two methods of securing prison reform —work and more work. He had studied the effect of colour on the environment of prisoners, and found that, if they were given abundant work in surroundings which contained nothing of the drabness associated with tho comic opera idea of a prison, remarkable results could be achieved. Penalties inflicted for offences against property were out of proportion to those imposed for offences against persons, Major Conder continued. Offenders against persons should be punished more severely. At times, too much sympathy was shown for the offender and too little for the victim. WAR ON THE LOCUST There is good hope that one of tho world's plagues is about to be written off, says the Morning Post. Since the Kings of Israel and before, the locust has preyed on man—not directly, but on his means of life, spreading famine through the- fields and adding to famine the pestilence that rises from drifts of rotting grasshopper, corpses. Insects are successful runners in life's race, because humanity has fought them blindly, without study, often slaughtering allies with enemies; and the locust lias persisted a3 a scourge over wide tracts of the world because only ferocity, not thought, was brought to the contest. .Tn recent years flamethrowers and aeroplanes raining down poison have been sent against the swarms; and these expedients were praised as scientific, when, in truth, they were casual and inefficient. The one chance was to master the ecology of the locust, to track him to the iuner province and breeding stronghold, from which at intervals innumerable hordes issue under a compulsion (like the crossbill, sandgrouse and perhaps the lemmings) to extend their range. And at last patience and system appear to have found the concentration points from which the redwings, the most destructive of Africa's locusts, launch periodic invasions. An officer of the Imperial Institute of Entomology—who deserves fame if his explorations prove right—has traced the redwing to two areas in Northern Rhodesia and Southern Tanganyika, and by surveillance and prompt attack when the swarms began to muster, it is believed the plagues can be stopped. Other observers are intent on the source of tho tropical migratory and the desert locusts. Since these insects in tho infested territories dispose of sugar plantations, tobacco, potatoes, pasture, trees, shrubs and all sorts of crops (a swarm has been seen to clear 00 acres of maize in 20 minutes) the saving t6 the world if the locust is brought under control will be inestimable. THE NEW ARCHITECTURE

Lecturing in Manchester 011 " The Creative Spirit of the Crisis" Mr. Erich Mendelsohn, the famous German architect, analysed with detail the radical changes which came into the world before the war and have since presented us with a world whose every function has been disturbed. He ■'raced the signs of change and resistance to change by examination of the arts and sciences. It scarcely seemed a matter of chance, he said, but ratjier in accordance with natural law that it should be the architect who first realised the change. For if wo accepted the view that the driving force of the world was natural law, and that every real creative achievement was a result of it, then there was only one standard, and that was the relation of the passing moment of our time to the continuum of all time. It should be the architect's business to see the new elements even in chaos. We had emerged with fantastic suddenness from the stable condition which we apparently enjoyed before the war. The future of man was now being violently prepared and might overtako us tomorrow. The question was whether man was capable of building himself a new life in the middle of chaos or revolution. It was apparent that the new life already had real existence in the arts. Architecture had its new constructions. The necessity of erecting for new industries in the shortest time had led to the standardisation of materials and construction and technical and mechanical details. The architect, was released from the forms of individualistic or classical styles, symmetry and geometric pattern. His business was to bo simply creative. Every problem was a direct original problem. He had to try to solve it so that all the parts were organically interlocked. If 110 succeeded in organising it in three dimensions rhythmically, then he achieved the pleasure called beauty. The new architectural beauty was not based on representational forms which could be borrowed from history, but was based on the fundamentals which represented the need and purpose of the work. This removed architecture from isolation and related it again • to life; it gave_it once more a simple language which (lie whole world could understand.