NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22860, 15 October 1937, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

BRAINS IN FIGHTING SERVICES There is now less initiative in tho Royal Navy and moro discouragement of ideas than over before, writes ViceAdmiral A. F. B. Carpenter in a letter to the Times on training naval officers. This must be heartrending to all officers who aro replly ambitious to achieve and deserve the higher commands, but who are aghast at the prevalent belief that tho royal road to promotion in peace-timo is that of doing what they are told while, in the natne of discipline, suppressing any progressive ideas that they may possess. When officers, after years of such training, do eventually reach the higher ranks, it is only natural that they, in their turn, should tend to regard their juniors as mere automatons. It is within the bounds oi possibility that this mental attitude is "the primary cause of tlie apparent lack of brains in both the older Fighting Services. . THE SOVEREIGN CURE Some 'writers on modern psychology have emphasised the fact that-by the repression of instincts a man may become ill, writes Mr. Henry Houston Aitchison, in "Psychology Without Sighs." The cave-man, if he is unduly repressed, adds Mr. Aitchison, may create trouble, and constantly be showing through the veneer of civilisation. The opposite conception is also true. If a man represses his ideals, and assumes a veneer of blase unbelief he may precipitate a serious conflict which will only be resolved by discovering a worthy ideal and giving himself to it. As Professor James —the greatest figure in psychological medicine that America has produced —says: "The sovereign cure for worry religious faith. The turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to him who has a hold of vaster and more permanent realities the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant things."

NEED FOR ACTION \ Surveying the economic and political situation in relation to the Church in addressing the Modem Churchmen's Conference at Oxford, Canon T. Guv Rogers, rector of Birmingham, said: — "As we look out upon the sullen and angry world from the comparative internal peace and security of the British Isles, we must feel, if we have any faith in a living God, that the Church is called upon to take its .life in its hands to serve the large purposes of the Kingdom of God. It has a unique opportunity; it could detach itself with more statesmanship and more goodwill from what is effeto and unchristian in the present order thin any European Church working amidst resentment and exasperation. It is action that is needed. Some day the age in which we live will be described, perhaps scornfully, as the age of conferences, 1 ' the age in which the Church never ceased talking but never did anything. It is no longer words but courage that is needed and the capacity to work and to suffer for a cause."

CONSTRUCTIVE PEACE POLICY © . - If we really desire peace, our first step must necessarily be to undo whatever injustice was done iii 1919, and to re-found our great attempt to construct a real society of the nations on a basis of justice for all, says Mr. Arthur Bryant, in the London Observer. That, of course, will be no easy matter: for*it must bo remembered that we cannot right whatever may have been the injustices of 1919 at the expense of committing new injustices against rights which have arisen since tliat date. But if, in a genuine desire to see that the dissatisfied nations are reasonably satisfied, Great Britain, as the most happily circumstanced of all the Powers, were to announce her sense that less than substantial justice was done in the heat and anger of 1919 and to propose a conference to discuss frankly and comprehensively the fears, grievances, and needs of all those who were ready on such a basis to the partners of a new world order, a great step toward world peace would have been taken. The credit which the apostles of violence have obtained in the modern world is entirely duo to the fact that any redress for. those who suffered under Versailles has been obtained, not by the agency of the League of Nations, but by defiance of its decrees. Some will argue that such a step is quixotic in that it is absurd to talk of negotiating with Hitler's Germany, But in taking that view they should recognise frankly that the alternative they cliooso must inevitably lead to another war.

WEAKER SEX AT ALL AGES As subject for his presidential address to tho zoology section of tho British Association for tho Advancement of Science, Professor F. A. E. Crew, of Edinburgh, selected "The Sex Ratio." The chief obvious features concerning the sex ratio in Britain, ho said, were that more males were born than females, but that afterwards the males' death-rate was higher. The facts were explicable on the assumption that tho primary sex ratio (the ratio at conception) was about 120 males to 100 females, but that tho males were/moro delicate at all ages. In late adolescence tho numbers of tho sexes were equal, and in maturity tho females outnumbered tho males, until among people of 85 and over women were more than twice ns numerous as men. The greater delicacy of the male in man, Professor Crew believed, was an instance of a general principle applicable to tho male sex in all organisms, and duo to tho male having a higher rate of metabolism, which made him loss resistant to unfavourable conditions. The sex ratio at birth was /'fin instrument of precision by which a human society may measure tho quality of its structure," a yard-stick to determine the success of social services and health measures. The equality of tho sexes in early maturity Professor Crew regarded as having been brought about by adaptive adjustment of primary sex ratio and differential sex mortality to givo equal numbers of males and females at the optimum period for reproduction. Tho precise sex ratio of a species must not be regarded as a biological accident, but as a delicate adjustment of contrary forces brought about by selection during the course of gestation.