NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22399, 21 April 1936, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION Sir Frederick Marquis, in opening tho session on employee representation at a conference held by the Industrial Welfare Society to discuss "Constructive Co-operation," spoke of the striking contrast between tho large amount of time, energy, research and money spent by employing firms on mechanical and technical advances in industry and the comparatively small amount of attention given to training people how to manage the personnel and the industries to be carried on with this wider technical knowledge. Scant attention was given by learned bodies to this matter, yet there was a major p-oblein of time in training people who wore going to be engaged in tho administrative side of industry to know something about tho emotions and reactions of the people whom they were going to control. They were devoting no attention at all to the understanding of those factors in administration that would avoid labour troubles. From his experience he was satisfied that labour did not want to cause trouble any more than employers did. In all industrial organisations there ought to be somebody charged with the job of seeing that the conditions under which people worked, and not merely the material, but also the mental conditions, were such that they worked happily and contentedly. DEMOCRACY AND FASCISM In a 8.8.C. lecture, " If Plato Lived Again," Mr. R.H. S. Crossman said: — We can refute the main charges which Plato brings against democracy by showing that modern representative government does not necessarily involve the tyranny of popular caprice as Athenian democracy did. In Britain we have tried to temper Athenian individualism with Spartan discipline. But that is only half his case. Can we rebut his second accusation that democracy, in its foreign dealings, will be self-willed and undisciplined? Do not nations claim in foreign affairs an unbridled freedom which they rightly refuse their own citizens? On the whole they do, and one of the reasons for the rise of Fascism i 3 the fact that we have not applied in international relations those principles which we assume at home. The modern State claims an undiluted freedom in foreign affairs, it brooks no check on its sovereign national will, it behaves as no party or class or individual dare behave in England to-day. And as a result, in those countries which have suffered through the international anarchy, there rises a belief that the military virtues alone can avail to preserve and ensure life in the European jungle. Fascism is really a result «f tho failure of the democratic spirit to secure for all nations, and for all individual men and women, the peace and security which they crave.

LIGHT ON THE JAPANESE Concluding a broadcast address upon the recent political assassinations in Japan Sir Francis Lindley, former British Ambassador at Tokio, said a point connected with the Tokio episode which must have struck many observers in Britain is the leniency with which tho rebellious officers were treated. In part this has to be accounted for by the measure of public approval, or, at any rate, of public toleration, which he has mentioned. But it is also largely due to the fact that the Japanese are temperamentally opposed to pushing things to extremes. At first sight this seems contradictory to the behaviour of the assassins; but the Japanese, like ourselves and other people, are made up of contradictions and it is one of the most striking features of the Japanese character that they always attempt to find u compromise in any dispute or struggle which arises in the country, whether it is a private quarrel or over a political or industrial question. Thus, in Japan, strikes are very rarely pushed to extremes, and if the police have reason to believe that the strikers are likely to resort to serious violence, they not infrequently intervene and force a settlement which tho employers would have wished to avoid. The same characteristic is seen in all walks of life, and it is one which those who are not intimately acquainted with Japan do not suspect. In this as in other ways the Japanese, for all their differences of civilisation and history and religion, resemble Britain's own island people, which for so long was allied with them to mutual advantage. THE RHINELAND ISSUE Britain was not called upon at this moment to judge the ultimate justice of what had happened in the Rhineland, said Mr. Winston Churchill in a recent speech. There was the preliminary question which ought first to be cleared out of the way. ihe Germans claimed that the Treaty of Locarno had been ruptured by tho FrancoSoviet Fact. That was their case and it was one that should be argued before the World Court at Tho Hague. The French had expressed themselves willing to submit this point to arbitration and to abide by the result. Germany should be asked to act in tho same spirit and to agree. If the German case was good and the World Court pronounced that the Treaty of Locarno had been vitiated by the Franco-Soviet Pact, then clearly tho German action, although utterly wrong in method, could not be seriously challenged by the League of Nations. As one of the Locarno Powers Britain was involved in this dispute because she had publicly expressed approval neatly a year ago of tho Franco-Soviet Pact, urged Germany to participate in it, and had at no time, so far as he was awaro, attempted to advise France against it. She therefore must in a sense submit herself to the World Court in order to ascertain the true position before she could take any sure step forward. The issue which was at stake in Europe was not the difference between France and Germany, or between Germany and the Locarno Powers. It was a dis puto between the Nazi Government and the League of Nations. It would make a profound difference to the history of tho world if the League emerged from the ordeal with added credit and authority. If the authority of the League was destroyed, as it. might well be, in the triumph of the Nazi regime, irrespective of law, events would continue to roll and slide remorselessly downhill toward the pit in which Western civilisation might bt> fatally engulfed.