NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22194, 22 August 1935, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

PUBLIC OPINION Public opinion was discussed by Mr. H. Ramsbotham, M.P., Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education, in a recent speech to an English teachers' association. " As long as we remain a democracy—and 1 trust we always shall —our legislators and administrators must pay attention to the views and sometimes to the prejudices of the general public," he said. " No doubt a dictator can afford to neglect them; at any rate, he can suppress them and pursue his own policy, regardless of the likes or dislikes of a large number of his subjects. We cannot, but our difficulty is to estimate the state of public opinion, for we all know by bitter experience the result of acting in advance of it. And in gauging the volume of public opinion in favour of a legislative proposal, it is possible to mistake the desire of a small but energetic and vocal minority for the desire of the great mass of the people. It is no good saying that it is the legislator's duty to do what he thinks ought to be done, whether the majority of the electors like it or not. That is no doubt what the dictator says in justification of his own actions. In the interest of material human progress he may very well be right, but it is not a method compatible with democratic government, and those who govern a democracy must often be content with more tentative decisions and tardy action for the sake of the greater good —the consent and acquiescence and comprehension and co-operation of the governed."

BRITISH GOVERNMENT'S AIMS deferring to the progress toward prosperity which had been made, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, said it was only the old, hard-boiled pessimists in the Liberal Party, who still wore weepers in their hats for the body of Free Trade that lay mouldering in its grave, who insisted on being thoroughly miserable when everybody else was happy. "I see no reason," he continued, "why we should think that this returning prosperity which has been coming to us is going to halt. On the contrary, I see every indication that it is going still farther in the same direction —but only on one condition, and that condition is that there shall be no sudden change of policy and no shock to public confidence. That is a danger of which we have to be aware, and do not let us forget that we have already had some pretty plain warning of what the Socialists would do had they the opportunity of carrying out their ideas. This Government has before it two paramount duties and aims. The first is to get our country safe, both hv providing it with adequate defences and by using all its power and its influence on every occasion to assist peace and security among the nations that are nearest to us. Our second duty is to do what Mr. Baldwin described the other day as the rebuilding of Britain to make this country more prosperous and a happier and healthier place for our people to live in. These are the two aims we are keeping before us."

SHAKESPEARE ON THE FILM ! Professor Max Reinhardt, fresh from supervising in the United States the : film production of "A Midsummer I Night's Dream," has confessed his faith iin " the regeneration of Shakespeare among the common people," by means of the cinema. He is so pleased with his first venture in its completed form that he contemplates a " Twelfth Night," a " Hamlet," and possibly a " Romeo and Juliet." It is, remarks the Manchester Guardian, an almost untrodden field on which he sets out, for the film, which has shown no compunction in ransacking any and every source, literary, historical and musical, for its themes, has on!y once laid hands on Shakespeare. That solitary occasion, the athletic and tempestuous " Taming of the Shrow," with which the Fairbanks' presented us, must have made most lovers of Shakespeare who saw it hope devoutly that Hollywood would keep its hands off the tragedies. But Reinhardt is not so easily to be discounted. He points to the advantages the screen has over the stage in presenting the fantastic and the superhuman, and certainly it is not hard to conceive a setting, for instance, of "The Tempest," in which all the camera's miraculous trickery could be bent to aiding Shakespeare's magic. The memory will still be fresh among lovers of the art of the screen of Fritz Lang's wonderful settings, in the great days of the German, silent film, for the music of Wagner's " Siegfried." They were a visual poem which even the atrocious captions used in the English version could not mar; and if similar genius were brought to Shakespearean settings the result might well bo memorable.

THE FLOW OF LIFE

There is a group of ideas that lias not only - introduced an extraordinary number of errors and misunderstandings into discussions as to the "races" of man, but has also involved a fallacious method of presentation, writes Mr. Julian Huxley, in the Yale Review. The evolution of man and, specifically, of the existing varieties ■ of man, is frequently represented in the form of a tree. Much misunderstanding has unfortunately arisen, in the course of evolutionary discussion, -by the use of this term and its dependents, "stem," "stock," "branch," "twig" and so on. The figure is in many ways very unfortunate, since the essential picture created by a tree is that of roots converging in a trunk, which ascends, becoming smaller, and gives off branches on the way. Now, most of the elements of this picture must be discarded if we would visualise the process of biological descent. First, there are no converging roots. Second, all trees have an innate rule of growth determining their general habit, whereas in biological descent the place and time of branching is determined by opportunity, by external circumstances, as well as and as much as by internal powers. Third, the question of which is branch and which trunk has an obvious answer for a tree, but is by no means obvious at any particular level of evolutionary descent. Fourth, • evolutionary branches may—if they have not proceeded too far — unite again after they have diverged and then either re-branch or remain united. This reunion of branches is especially pronounced in man, concludes Mr. Huxley. The great flow of life is, in fact, something unique in nature which is insusceptible of presentation in similes.