NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22139, 19 June 1935, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

ECONOMIC WAR Sir Percy Bates, chairman of the Cunard Steam Ship Company, speaking at the annual meeting of the company at Liverpool, said: —" To put the future in short, the company cannot prosper until prosperity returns to the Atlantic, the ocean which the company was founded to cross. The Atlantic cannot prosper until the world prospers. I doubt whether in the old sense and to the old degree prosperity can return to the world until the world again has some acknowledged and authorised medium of international exchange. There is a war to-day of tariffs, quotas and shifted currencies. The worst of it is that the situation is not officially recognised as a war. Had it been recognised we might have \had a peace conference, with far greater possibilities for the good of mankind than the Disarmament Conference at Geneva."

KINDS OF LAUGHTER The different kinds of laughter—the cold, the mirthless, the cynical, the mad —are discussed by Dr. Lynn Harold Hough in his new book, "The Church and Civilisation," but ho reserves his happiest page for the laughter of children. "Listen," he commands, "at the keyhole of any century and you hear an astonishing and most delightful sound. It is the sound of the carefree laughter of multitudes of bright and happy children. What resources of simple and unalloyed gaiety these children possess. They fairly seem to come dancing down through the centuries. From age to age they pass their joyous songs along. You see tho secret of it all in the children's eyes. Insincerity has not fluttered into their minds on its ugly wings. Cynicism has not lighted its false light in their hearts. They are as yet unbroken by the burden and stress and passion of life." PEACE OUT OF MENACE " The civil population are now realising that in the next war they will be exposed to all the dangers of actual -warfare. This .knowledge is the strongest motive in the desire to avoid another war," asserts Lord Snowden in the Sunday Dispatch. " I have always held that the increasing destructiveness of war will eventually bring its abolition, for when it threatens to annihilate the civil population on both sides no nation will dare to engage in it." The same point of view was taken by Mr. Geoffrey Mander, M.P., in addressing a youth conference at Malvern. "Nothing makes nations conscious of their dependency upon each other more than aviation," he said. " I cannot help feeling rather encouraged by the menace of aerial aggression, because it is so real, so terrible in its possibilities, that surely no people with any sanity can tolerate the idea of allowing their capitals, their women and children, to be destroyed from the air, as will happen in the near future unless the present organisation of the world is altered." ADVANCED MEDICAL SCHOOL The British Post Graduate Medical School, which the King opened at Hammersmith on May 13, will fill, notes the Listener, a serious gap in the organisation of medical studies in Britain. Hitherto doctors coming to London to put themselves abreast of the latest developments in medical knowledge have had to find their way about a maze of schools and hospitals organised primarily for undergraduate training, and offering only piecemeal facilities for advanced study. The Fellowship of Medicine has done what it can. providing information and arranging inclusive fees; but the courses remained large sporadic, unrelated, scattered at odd places over the whole of London. This lack of organisation has been in striking contrast to systematic arrangements in German clinics and at such other medical centres as Vienna, Baltimore and Boston. The new school will appeal in the first place to doctors from other countries and from other parts of the Empire who want to acquire a specialist's knowledge and skfll in some one branch of their profession. It will provide research facilities for visiting students in the sciences allied to medicine. But it will also arrange regular refresher courses for general practitioners, panel doctors and medical men on furlough from overseas. The school has been incorporated as a College of the University of London.