NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22404, 28 April 1936, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

RAISING YOUTH'S QUALITY The importance of ensuring that the youth of England should be of the finest quality was emphasised at the annual meeting of the Association of Technical Institutions by Mr. A. D. K. Owen. Speaking on "Entrance Into Industry" he said that the importance of the juvenile section of the population was likely to become even greater during the next 40 years. "Jhe total population of Great Britain seems destined not only to shrink in size, but also to grow older in composition," he said. "Boys and girls will bo far fewer in numbers, and they will represent a much smaller proportion of the population. Dwindling numbers are going to increase the value of youth. It is most important therefore that we should make sure that it is of the finest quality." AFFORESTATION IN BRITAIN Mr. Neville Chamberlain's announcement in the House of Commons of the intention to increase the grant-in-aid to the Forestry Fund to £500,000 for the next five years calls attention, says the Sunday Times, to one of the practical efforts of the Government to create productive occupation, about which too little is generally known. The Forestry Commission is a Government department which has under its care 108 forest units of 360,000 plantable acres in England and Wales and 89 of 205,000 acres in Scotland. About half this area has so far been planted with 500,000,000 . trees, mainly soft woods; less than 7 per cent of the planted trees are hard woods. With the extra funds now to be made available, the Commissioners will gradually expand their normal planting programme to 30,000 acres a year. This is exclusive of a scheme for the acquisition and laying-out of 200,000 acres within a radius of 15 miles of the Special Distressed Areas. This particular task will occupy 10 years, giving direct work to an average of 2200 persons a year. It will cost about £3,000,000. MR. H. G. WELLS ON PEACE Man desires peace upon his planet, writes Mr. H. G. Wells in the Spectator. He desires release from the perpetual anxiety of impending violence, compulsion, conscription, discipline, effort, destruction, waste and death, which the organisation of his affairs into war-making societies and states involves. And he lives now in a world in which peace and a general release from these obsessions could plainly be attained and secured by the practical fusion of the Foreign Offices of quito a few "Great Powers" in the world. Every main line and structure of a world pax has been thought out and projected. There is no other method of peace. Tho plans for an eternal world peace have been convincingly sketched in outlino by hundreds of thinkers and writers. The deepening horror of the alternatives has been made plain to the general imagination. Peace ballots and suchlike canvassing of the popular mind show an explicit realisation of the situation. For all that, we prepare steadily for war and drift toward war. Yet there is the desire. There is the broad conception of a method for its satisfaction. Why is it frustrated? There can bo no other answer than that for all its wide distribution that desire for peace is too weak, too discontinuous and too incoordinated for the adverse impulses. A. DICTATOR'S QUALITIES In this combination of the gifts of a scholar, scientist and philosopher, never happier than when reading in his great library at Irene, aloof, indifferent to the common run of human weaknesses, superior in mind to his fellow, self-con-fident, but in no way haughty or proud, capable of ruthless practical action, idealist in ultimate purpose, without illusion in immediate method, is to be found tho secret of General Smuts' great career, and of both his successes and his defeats, writes the Marquess of Lothian in reviewing Mrs. Sarah Gertrude Millin's biography of the great South African. He has made himself not only a leader in his own Afrikander land, but in the British Commonwealth and the world as a whole. His speeches on international affairs are awaited and read all round the earth, and the mark he has made in world politics and among world philosophers is deep. But, with all his administrative gifts and political talents, he was rejected by his own countrymen for more than 10 years when he was at ,the height of his powers for men of far inferior insight and mind and executive ability. The great dictators can be of the stuff of which General Smuts is made. But tho leaders of democracy must be more warmly human, less brilliant, evoking in the common man the feeling that hero is another man, better, no doubt, but in his feelings and mental processes apparently like unto himself. SOVIET ATTITUDE TO LEAGUE " The attitude of the Soviet Union is predetermined by its general policy of struggling for peace, for the collective organisation of security, and for the maintenance of one of the instruments of peace—the existing League of Nations," said Mr. Litvinoff, Russian delegate to the League, in an address at Geneva. " We consider that one cannot struggle for peace without at the same time defending the integrity of international obligations. One cannot struggle for the collective organisation of security without adopting collective measures against breaches of international obligations. We do not, however, class among 6uch measures collective capitulation in face of tho aggressor, in face of an infringement of treaties, or collective encouragement of such infringements, and still less collective agreement to a bonus for the aggressor by adopting a basis of agreement or other plans acceptabla or profitable to the aggressor. We cannot preserve the League of Nations if it does not carry out its own decisions, but, on tho contrary, accustoms the aggressor to ignore its recommendations, its admonitions, or its warnings. Such a League of Nations will never be taken seriously by anyone. The resolutions of such a League will only be'come a laughing stock. Such a League is not required, and I will go farther and say that such a League may even be harmful, because it may lull the vigilance of the nations and give rise to illusions among them which will prevent them from themselves adopting the necessary measures of self defence in good time."