NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22000, 5 January 1935, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

GRAVITY OF UNEMPLOYMENT "We cannot afford to The timo has conic j for replacing inquiry and discussion by effective action," said Dr. Hcnsori, Bishop of Durham, at the Durham Diocesan Conference, when speaking of unemployment in the northern areas. "While we go on talking and floating benevolent schemes for relieving distress," he continued, "the disease of chronic unemployment is eating into the vitals of the nation and binding upon the future the supreme distress of a degraded civic type. When I consider the crowded state of the Government programme, and the formidable character of the questions, international and Imperial, which must be answered, I cannot exorcise from m.v mind the fear that this problem of unemployment may fall into the background. State action is indispensable and that 011 a scale commensurate with the social malady which continuing unemployment creates." The bishop added that it was difficult to overestimate the value of the public service the Prince of Wales was rendering by his unfailing interest in the unemployed.

CHRISTIANITY AND SCIENCE "God spoke and speaks to us by His prophets, and among them are the men of science of to-day," said the Bishop of Birmingham, Dr. Barnes, in an address in a London church. The dualism in Christianity was not that of "the natural and the supernatural, but of the natural and the spiritual. The spiritual was an emergent from the biological, just as the living was an emergent from the non-living. All such emergencies were part of the creative activity of God. Christianity insisted that the world was not an illusion, and that man could attain to an oven greater apprehension of truth. Because truth was one of the fundamental values of the universe, man must seek it. In this Christianity and science were at one. It was no accident that science flourished in an environment created by post-Renaissance Christian belief. Guiding the affairs of life there was some unity of creative power. He could not think of God fashioning man as a workman makes a machine; there must be some ground of union common to God and man. This ground of union made possible alike man's approach to God in prayer and God's response, and it made intelligible the unique nearness of Christ to God. Christ's coming was within the scheme of God's continuous revelation of Himself. RIBBON DEVELOPMENT The rapid growth of "ribbon development" along English arterial roads is causing grave alarm. In a joint letter to the Prime Minister and the Ministers of Health and Transport, asking for early legislation, four motoring organisations and four other bodies state: —"Except in the counties of Surrey, Middlesex and Essex the county councils in charge of the main roads are powerless to control the buildings along them. A population strung out for miles can never develop the faculty of local self-government which the same number of people grouped in a properly planned township acquire. A system of housing is thus being created in some ways more injurious to the people than the slums which the Government is now endeav-

ouring to remove at the cost of millions. The slums are blots on the landscape. The rapid conversion of country roads into streets is fast destroying the landscape as a whole. The immediate effect must certainly be to prompt those who are looking to profit from ribbon development to accelerate their programme and anticipate a change in the law Every month's delay means that so many miles of open road are ribboned, and on every mile the average of pedestrian accidents is raised in the ratio of one to four. Ribbon development as a whole is a social problem second to no other in importance. It is changing for the worse the social structure in which an increasing number of our people will live, and is raising the cost of living against them. The future shape of the country is at stake." A practical proposal made by the Surrey County Council is to acquire from landholders free of cost sufficient land to make each arterial road ]Boft. wide between fences, and as building takes place to lay down subsidiary carriageways for local traffic, so designed that through traffic cannot use them. MENACES TO FREEDOM " The great danger that faces humanity to-day is the danger of tho loss of freedom," said Mr. Stanley Baldwin, in an address at Bonar Law College. "Consider for a moment how freedom has gone in groat countries. Take Russia. There her old history, whatever it was worth, was cut off at the roots, and a party of men gained control who intended that all memory of the past should be dead. They started on the theory that all children should be educated in something entirely new to the then existing generation of Russia, in the hope that in time there would be a country the whole ot whose adult population would have been brought up on tho linos that the theorists who had worked out their system in back rooms hoped to see in the product of their dreams. The essential corollary to that is tho absence of all intellectual and religious freedom. What tho product may be ultimately no man can tell, or how far tho training may be modified. But you have there a vast area of the earth's surface where the people are being brought up in complete ignorance of everything that goes on outgido its own borders, with no freedom of thought, of tho press, or of religion; and you have to-day in Germany the possibility—l will not put it higher than that —that something of the same kind may be attempted. We none of us know to-day what is going on in that country in regard to its re-arma-inent with any certainty, and that, is a most extraordinary thing. Among the extreme Nazists in Germany to-day you have the same ideas being put foruord —not the Bolshevik ideas —that if you are to have pure Nazism, whatever that might be, you can onl\ attain it by having the •children voting and training them up in it. You know the kinil of training that will be given, and if it becomes universal you may see this within a short time; that from the Rhine to the Pacific there will be a people running into millions who have been trained to be either Bolshevik robots or Nazi robots."