NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22247, 23 October 1935, Page 12

NOTES AND COMMENTS

PROBLEM OF DISTRIBUTION "Troops on manoeuvres," it has been decreed by the British War Office, "are forbidden to throw away disused safety razor-blades. The attention of all ranks must bo drawn to the danger of this practice." This order has started a new discussion in London on the old problem of what to do with tho discarded blades. Ingenious persons at one time and another have, savs tho News Chronicle, suggested uses for them. Attached to a piece of stick, they can be used in the kitchen, for instance, for chopping up meat and vegetables. But the number of such implements required is limited; and meanwhile the pile of blades rises. Now a real and effectual outlet is offered to the shaver by a Congo missionary. The Congo natives apparently will take any number of disused blades. They use them for all sorts of purposes, among other things, as currency. It is the latest example of the fact that the problem of distribution is the real worry of the modern world. "CROONERS" PILLORIED A vigorous attack on "crooners" and their methods was made by Mr. P. H. B. Lyon, headmaster of Rugby, in the educational science section of the British Association. " What poetry should be properly opposed to in the young mind," he said, " is not prose, but the rhymed doggerel which is chanted to tho latest crooning melody. It is a queer world when a sleek, silky-voiced lounge-lizard can perpetrate a few quatrains of noxious slush to the tawdry and temporary affections seeking satisfaction ' in Juno under the moon ' or ' 'neath the summer sky of last July,' and ' in December wo shall remember,' and be forthwith accepted by the toleration of tho whole of a manly generation, while the great spirits of the world, building immortal verse out of their heart's stuff in poverty, in blindness, in despair, sing to them in vain. How are we to convince our boys that poetry is not a luxury but an essential ?•" NO MORE DOLLAR DIPLOMACY "The American Secretary of State, Mr. Cordell Hull, in obtaining the withdrawal of the Abyssinian oil concession to an American syndicate, can be sure he has behind him the whole conscious mind of * the American people," said Mr. Raymond Swing, in a recent 8.8.C. broadcast. "It can be said for him that ho is following consistently the line that he takes nearer homo. Intervention in Central American affairs for the benefit of our business interests was prompt under previous Administrations, but it has been specifically disavowed by President Roosevelt, and—particularly in Cuba, whero the temptation to interfere has been strong—the promise not to intervene with physical force has not been broken. There will be no more 'dollar diplomacy' while he is President, Mr. Roosevelt is quoted as saying to-day. To Europe facing a most menacing conflict, this foreign policy may appear as negative and of no great service to the cause of world peace. This is an aspect you will judge for yourselves, but to many Americans it appears positive for this reason: the abhorrence of war is not being expressed si.mplv in generalities, but in the determination to prevent the formation of those patterns of behaviour which can be recognised as leading to war." READING PUBLIC GROWS If there remain any persons who believe that broadcasting, the cinema and other modern forms of recreation and culture have exercised a deleterious effect on the habit of reading, let them turn, says the Listener, to the latest report of the Library Association, .describing the extraordinary progress made during the past decade by the library services operating in the London and Home Counties area. In 1934 these libraries served a population one and three-quarter times as large 9 as in 1924; they issued nearly two and a-half times as many books; their stock of books is nearly twice what it was, and nearly three times as many persons are registered readers for the purpose of home reading only. Twelve million people live in the area, and durinc 1934 57,000,000 books were issued to them, the stock of books available for their choice amounting to 6,500,000. Nearly 10 per cent of the population are now registered for home reading. One of the most important developments has been the pooling of book resources. "In brief," says the report, "the effect of this development of the public library service is that the individual reader at any local library, instead of beine confined to the stock of that library, now has the use of a potential stock of several million volumes."

HEALTH IN THE TROPICS A Pacific Health Conference, which has been meeting at Sydney, has served to spread yet more widely the news that the tropics are now no longer to be spoken of as naturally unhealthy. Picturesque phrases like " the white man's grave " are not often heard today, says the Listener; but there is still a very widespread impression that life is almost inevitably shortened by any prolonged residence in hot countries. The truth is that the tropics need a special way of living, and that fewer liberties can be taken in them than in the temperate zones. Somo years ago the Colonial Office V'blished vital statistics for Europeans in West Africa, showing the fenormous improvement which a quarter of a century has brought about. The steady improvement there and in other parts of the tropics is very largely the result of the discovery of the malaria-carrying mosquito by Sir Ronald Ross in 1900. If the death rate among officials is now aiound eight per thousand, where it was 80 in the last century, it is mainly duo to the great advances in tropical medicine, of which that discovery is the supreme instance. The occupation of Central Africa is still a very recent thing, and many health questions, like the later effects of a childhood spent in the tropics, await the judgment of time. But the popular impression is still too widespread, particularly on the Continent, that nature lias forbidden large tracts of Africa to European men. It is of some importance, in a land-hungry world, that the more encouraging truth should become widely known, that most of the old objections to the tropics have lost their force, thanks to advances in invention and knowledge.