NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22145, 26 June 1935, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

NO PEACE WITHOUT JUSTICE "After all, the basis of any permanent peace is justice, and we cannot have justice unless there are these two institutions as part of the League of Nations —a tribunal to settle all disputes and an International Police Force," said Lord Davies, speaking in the House of Lords. "May I quote the words of Pascal, which, I think, are very germane to this question: 'lt is just that whatsoever is just should be pursued, it is necessary that whatsoever is strongest should bo pursued. Justice without force is impotent; force without justice is a tyranny. Justice without force is a nivth, because there are always the bad men; force without justice stands convicted of itself. We must, therefore, put together justice and force; and therefore so dispose things that whatsoever is just is mighty, and whatsoever is mighty is just.' "

"LEAGUE NEEDS A SOUL" The outbreak of the World War disclosed the reality, even if it also disclosed the weakness, of world unity, writes Canon C. E. Paven in the Listener. It proved that, as a result of the exploration and opening up of all countries and of their mutual dependence, no one of the great nations could act without producing effects upon all the rest. Christians, commissioned to a world-wide fellowship and penitent for their failure to rise above a merely national patriotism, have realised their responsibility for maintaining an allegiance in which racial and national loyalties are transcended. The League of Nations needs a soul. Only on the basis of men's deepest experience can the nations reach a union that will endure. Only as they are agreed in their views of the meaning and character of good life can they hope to co-operate for its attainment. MANUAL EMANCIPATION We are by no means so completely slaves of the machine as we sometimes think, asserts Lord Eustace Percy, M.P., in an article, " Teaching Men to be Free," published in the Listener. The schools have got far too much into the habit of thinking that the machine has made it impossible to do what that old revolutionary, Pousseau, recommended: that the teacher should give his pupils a working knowledge of the tools used in all trades. It is still possible, and it is worth while. It is more worth while than anything else in education. The most helpless of our unemployed to-day are the clerks who have had to leave their desks in commercial offices. It is not true that the man who can make things for himself and grow things for his own dinner table is not more independent than his less skilled neighbour. He is far more independent in the use of his leisure, for a man's capacity to enjoy leisure depends on his capacity for creative work. And even in his opportunities for earning a livelihood he may be more independent, because he will be more adaptable. THE PRINTED WORD

"If I cast a retrospective eye on tennis, hiking, football, 'dogs,' broadcasting, cocktail parties, summer-time, crosswords, and dancing, I do so in order to emphasise the absurd lengths to which we have gone in the feverish anxiety to prove that the reading classes are a rapidly diminishing quantity in society," writes Mr. Cecil Palmer, the publicist, in the Daily Mail. "When, as seems inevitable, television is added to the amenities of home life i do not doubt that its encroachment on the leisure and interest of the community will be heralded by shrieks of anguish from the big noises in the world "f letters. What, after all, is the plain, incontrovertible truth on the subject? Categorically, it is this. Never previously in the whole annals of publishing has there existed so large a book-reading public as that which is in being today. It is a fact that the number of books read annually during the last three years in the United Kingdom is beyond computation by even the most expert of statistical brains. Mark you, not mere tens of millions, but hundreds of millions. And still there remain the indisputable truths that there are more publishers prospering than ever there were, and that authorship is spreading its net so widely that we are, as a community, in imminent danger of becoming n 'nation of authors'! The printed word is invulnerable and its magic eterual." MILK THE PERFECT FOOD

In speaking on human nutrition to members of the Royal Society of Arts, Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, professor of bio-chemistry at Cambridge University and this year president of the Royal Society, had a good deal to say on the special value of milk. Apart from its necessary and obvious functions in infant feeding, he says, there is abundant evidence, not of the vaguer sort, but based upon sound experiment and observation, that milk is an exceptionally valuable food during the whole period of growth. It would seem, indeed, that, apart from merits which would be expected from its known constituents: its high quality proteins, its richness in lime and phosphorus and its (less abundant) vitamins, milk must possess some subtle qualities —perhaps duo to some special association among the constituents —as a food supporting growth. It is well to know, adds Sir Frederick, ±Jiat British educational authorities have fully recognised the value of giving extra milk to school children. Four years ago the practice was extended, and recently, owing to Government action, still more is reaching the schools. It is to be hoped that amid the great attention now being given to milk production, milk prices and milk purity, that inquiries should extend to the question as to whether the existing methods of its distribution to the general public are the best possible. The composition and qualities of milk, representing as they do Nature's own effort to provide a food complete in itself, support the modern claims concerning the complexity of nutritional needs. Of the many factors that recent research has revealed as essential, all, or nearly all, are contained in it. Its qualities are doubtless specially adjusted to th* period of growth, but growth does not cease with infancy. In later periods milk can only constitute a portion of the diet, but it adds something of quite special value.