NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22796, 2 August 1937, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

OBSTACLES TO WORLD UNITY Vaguo talk about world unity ivas condemned by Sir Alfred Zimmern, professor of international relations at Oxford University, in a recent lecture. Three root problems must be considered by any individual or organisation wishing to promote international co-operation, ho said. Theso were: The diversity of mankind, unequal social development in different countries; and man's natural lack of interest in other countries. They must face up to the natural indifference of man to what was happening in other countries. That indifference was one of the ultimate facts about international politics.

TOLERATION IN DEMOCRACY The basis of an ordered democracy is toleration, writes Mr. Arthur Bryant in the London Observer, in comment on the proceedings at the Imperial Conference. It allows people to govern or misgovern themselves in their own way, in the conviction that only by experiment will the best way appear. It believes that one part of mankind has a right to hold different opinions from those of another; it respects the natural diversity of things and docs not fall into tho hoary error of trying to enforce uniformity. It has needed tho fresh counsel of the free British peoples beyond the seas to remind us in Britain of these truths, which "it is our supreme claim to honour that wo once taught the world. MUSINGS ON TIME Musing,on the flint-mines in Norfolk, known as Grimes Graves, Mr. H. J. Massingham writes:—l know of nothing more tranquillising, more consplirig, and, in a sense, more religious than the contemplation, by aid of so dramatic a medium as Grimes Graves, of huge stretches of time. Tho little, dangerous, nerve-torturing present drops away like a burden off the back, and all men arc at home in eternity. On tho thin grass of tho desert wrapped about the minefield the Neolithic herdsman might, but for the greater poverty of pasture due to desiccation, 'still bo following his sheep and pigs and long-faced oxen. I might look up to see him from tho stone with the mark of the flake chipped from it I had bent to examine, with hardly a start of wonder. It was the flint underneath tho earth, the bono of tho desert, the magnet of man for age upon age, the corner-stone of his civilisation, the means to live of his primitive forebears; it was the flint which had retouched the face of inflexible Time and given it a look which welcomed its own end. CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ISLAM The comparatively recent domination of Western Europeans, English and French, over Mohammedan lands is due to causes mainly material and therefore ephemeral, writes Mr. Hilaire Belloc in his new book, "The Battle Ground," which reviews the a g e .old struggle between Christian and Islam. One must always look to moral (or, more accurately, to spiritual) causes for tho understanding of human movements and political change. Of theso causes, by far the most important is the philosophy adopted by the community, whether that philosophy can bo fully expressed as a religion, or taken for granted without overt definition. There is with us (Western Europeans) a complete chaos in religious doctrine where religious doctrine is still held. As nations we worship ourselves, wo worship the nation; or wo worship (some of us) a particular economic arrangement believed to be the satisfaction of social justice. Those who direct us, and from whom the tone of our policy is taken, havo no major spiritual interest. Islam has not suffered this spiritual decline; and in contrast between the religious certitudes still strong throughout the Mohammedan world, as lively in India as in Morocco, active throughout North Africa and Egypt, even inflamed through contrast and the feeling of repression in Syria—more particularly in Palestine —lies our peril. Wo havo returned to the Levant,. wo havo returned apparently more as masters than ever we were during the struggle of the Crusades —but we havo returned bankrupt in that spiritual wealth which was the glory of the Crusades. BARRIE'S OTHER-WORLDLINESS South of the Border the flowering in a Scot of the talents that made Barrie famous will seem more miraculous than it does to his fellow-countrymen, who know that others than John Knox havo been the fathers of the Scottish nation, says the Glasgow Herald in an article on the occasion of Sir James Barrie's death. The sort of fantastic humour that won Barrie such enormous popularity as a playwright is far from being tho. creation of his own genius. It is, indeed, characteristically Scottish in its essentials—a native product. But whereas in tho North this whimsicality is a sturdy, homely vessel, Barrie so shaped and refined it as to make it a work of art, bettor fitted for the collector's cabinet than the kitchen dresser. Reality rarely touched Barrio's writing. He spent his life, as he said in his rectorial address at St. Andrews, "playing hide and seek with angels." And in the dedication to the five begetters of "Peter Pan," ho recalls to them, "as you swung monkey-wise from branch to branch in tho tree of make-believe you reached the treo of knowledge. Sometimes you swung back." The Barrie of the plays was always swinging back. He did not see life steadily or whole. Indeed, he looked on the world as a wild creature of the woods might do, peeping round the trunk of ' a tree and scurrying back to his hiding hole deep in the branches. Ho was, perforce, in the world, but never of it. Playing hide! and seek with angels is a charming occupation, but it resolves no doubts, it merely hides them behind a rosy cloud. This was at "once Barrio's strength and weakness. He knew, none better, how little anxious more than half the world /is to face reality, and how readily it would isport with him in the fourth dimension of make-believe once he piped the tune. It may be that for those who like to keep their feet firmly planted on tho solid earth he had no message. But is it nothing that he succeeded marvellously in giving joy to more than half —a great deal more than half—of his fellows? Few of us Avant to have our feet planted firmly on the solid earth all the time. That fate would bo intolerable..