NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22640, 30 January 1937, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

RAKING OVER THE PAST Nagging one another about pasts that their owners would fain bury has always been a favourite amusement of mankind, writes Miss Rose Macaulay in a recent article. Where were you last night P How many retreats, and how quickly, did you make in the last war? How many disastrous advances? What did you promise the country at the last election? To what treaties and pacts did you swear at Geneva, at Locarno, at every watering-place in Europe? How many of them did you at once proceed to break? What about the Boer War and the British Empire? How shockingly you havo all practically always behaved! The Irish, those prime naggers, are still going on about Cromwell, 1798, and 191(3. The various religious bodies arc still raking up with rancour the deplorable things they did to one another in past ages. The past of no individual, no group, no nation, will bear a moment's inspection. Yet how much it gets! TEARS ACCOMPANY JOY# Yukichi Fukuzawa, one of the philosophers of our (Japanese) Meiji era, once said, " Please excuse me from Heaven. To sit quietly on a lotus flower year after year would be altogether too constrained a life for me." Indeed, we all feel that wo should like to alight from out lotus flower occasionally, writes Mr. T. Kagawa, in his latest book, " The Thorn in the Flesh." Though we might havo to deny ourselves the presence of Buddha our hearts long for change, sometimes even for a chance to weep. It is for this reason that we sometimes put red pepper into our noddles and macaroni. When we understand the craving for variation adversity ceases to be adversity to us. There are men who criticise God by asking why He made tears at all. The infinite grace of God is concealed in the fact that tears accompany joy M .an was not made to cackle with laughter from morning to night; only lunatics or mental deficients do that. ABOLISHING THE QUOTA

There is a general agreement among those anxious for a revival of world trade that the first step toward it must be the abolition of the quota system, asserts the Spectator. The British Government has itself recognised the desirability of such a step, though it shows little signs of putting it into practice; it claims, indeed, that other countries must lead the way. I* ranee did lead, and now Turkey, to her credit, follows suit. As from January the system of quota restriction is abolished in Turkey, and goods other than those completely prohibited may now enter without limitation of quantity. The Government of Kamal Ataturk has several times shown itself to be of an intelligence superior to that of most dictatorships; its latest decision is one which democracies might follow to their advantage. It is at least encouraging to find one country anxious to adopt a more rational trade policy than those strangling the commerce of most of the world. NATIONAL MAINTENANCE

Lord Monkswell asked in the House of Lords recently how much the Government estimated that the people of Great Britain must save every year to ensure that the value of the national estate did not diminish through the processes of ordinary wear and tear and obsolescence; whether it considered that the requisite sum was being saved and, if not, what plans it had to meet the situation. Lord Monkswell said that the question that was causing misgiving was whether national savings were great enough to maintain the efficiency of the means of production. Bankers and statisticians agreed in placing the total capital wealth of the country at somewhere between £.'50,000,000,000 and £10,000,000,000. The wealth represented by this sum was based on material objects, and all of them were wearing out at different rates. It was probably fair to assume that the average depreciation due to wear and tear was 2 per cent per annum. This meant that to keep in good working order the whole of the property of the whole nation or to replace obsolete material the sum of £600,000,000 or £800,000,000 must be provided every year over and above the living expenses of the whole nation. The sum of approximately £100,000,000, taken out of capital in the form of death duties, had to bo added, and, taking the lower estimate of the wealth of the country, £700,000,000 must be saved every year merely to prevent the nation from becoming poorer. BRAINS RATHER THAN BRICKS

Sir Farquhar Buzzard, Hcgius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, recently outlined his hopes and provisional plans in the establishment of the great post-graduate school of clinical research, made possible by the gift of Lord Nuffield of £2,000,000. He emphasised, above all, the importance which the founding of such a school is likely to have in the development of a happier and fitter national life and of its influence, of untold value, on medical research work. "No one can foretell the exact lines on which the scheme will develop," said Sir Farquhar, "but tho principle we propose to follow is to find the best men possible for the four chairs which form the basis of the scheme, and, having found thom, to got their help in working out an organisation. In other words, we arc not going to build something and find people to fit in. We are going to find the people -and build around them, and that is the only proper way to go about it. It must bo realised that the scheme, which is based really on the financing of a number of fulltime workers, is necessarily an expensive one, and we hope as regards all expenditure to follow the motto, Thains rather than bricks.' The great principle behind the plan is that of bringing together in a suitable atmosphere the clinical worker and those engaged in the university departments associated with the sciences ancillary to medicine —pathology, bacteriology and anatomy, for instance. We hold the view that tho progress of medicine now onward is dependent upon collaboration of Lhis kind; that the field of knowledge is so wide and so specialised that you must got your experts together from all points of view to advance further."