NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23011, 12 April 1938, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

DETERIORATION IN IDLENESS One of the tragedies of our time is that there are still men who are willing to work and cannot find it, writes Mr. Arthur Mee in a recent article. But it is still more tragic that men who have not worked for years are sometimes compelled to remain idle when work comes their way because they are unfit for it. Of 20 men given work in Durham not long ago only four were able to work beyond the second day. The other 16 had been so weakened by 11 years of idleness that they could not carry on. It must have been a bitter hour for those 16 men when their triumph ended so quickly in defeat. For years they had despaired of finding work, and when employment came it was found that work was beyond their strength. It is a tragedy that many have foreseen, and of which the nation has been repeatedly warned.

VOCATIONS FOR GIRLS In her book, "Journalist's Wife," Mrs. Lilian Mowrer ends with a melancholy speculation on the sort of life that faces those who are growing up in the modern world she and her husband, as American news correspondents in Europe, have observed. In the case of her own daughter, she confesses that she has taken the precaution of teaching the child a trade. I want her to be able, Mrs. Mowrer writes, to do something with her hands, something so simple, so close to the roots of hmnan life, that even a brokendown society will find her useful. Even a world ravaged by war or derailed by insensate revolution will eat, wear clothes, seek shelter and try at times to forget its material plight. Those who can contribute to the fulfilment of fundamental needs require little further insurance. The appropriate knowledge of such a matter is at least within the powers of parents to provide.

WAR TO KEEP PEACE "I am not a critic of the League," said Sir Charles Mallet in a broadcast debate with Viscount Cecil. "But I am to-day a critic of the League of Nations Union, which, I think, has been swept off its feet b,v its indignation against wrong, and is now trying to persuade us that some vague form of collective coercion is the only way to establish right. How can you reconcile these counsels of violence with the pledges of peace given by nil the nations, and with the repudiation of war which is the basis of the League? How can you in the same breath preach peace as a binding oljigation, and insist upon collective wars if necessary to make your views prevail? Nothing to-day is easier for unwise or arbitrary people than to involve us in a general war which would wipe out the younger generation and multiply a hundredfold the cruelties we have seen in Abyssinia, China and Spain. You will shatter the League if you make it an instrument of war like that. I plead not for less courage, but for more steadiness and commonsense, for more willingness to face realities even if thev don't fall in with our desires, and above all for a larger, stronger patience to work out our purpose of goodwill and peace."

MEMORABLE PARLIAMENT When the present British Parliament has run its course it will have to be given a special name, writes "Atticus" in the Sunday Times. Again and again in the last two years the vividness, the drama and the tragedy of events have focussed the eyes of the whole world on the scene at Westminster. Its members swore allegiance to King George V., and a few weeks later filed into Westminster Hall in a fading winter light to receive the dead body of their King. They swore allegiance to King Edward VIII., and in less than a year listened to the message that he could not go on. They swore allegiance to King George VI., and in Westminster Abbey acclaimed him in the unforgettable grandeur of the Coronation. There is a nobility about tragedy, but there was only pain that day in this Parliament when, following the Budget leakage, a Minister and a private member made their explanations and withdrew from political life. There was the clash of great events and a fierce division of loyalties when Sir Samuel Hoare. the second Foreign Minister of the National Government to fall, spoke from the famous place below the gangway and announced the defeat of realism at the hands of emotional idealism. It is a Parliament of many moving and tempestuous memories. And now we must add to the list the painful scenes of last week, when yet another Foreign Secretary, Mr. Eden, threw in his hand and proclaimed, like Elijah, "It is enough." PARISH PUMP IN FRANCE

Parochialism is apparently a governing motive in*the Parliaments of large as well as small countries, as an incident quoted by the Paris correspondent of the London Observer goes to show. The Army Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, he writes, was examining the composition of the rations, or "l'ordinaire," of the conscript, and the possibility of improving its quality and variety. The principal meal of the day, as is well known, is generally referred to as "la soupe," as it chiefly consists of a dish, which is not soup only, but a general stew of meat and vegetables, and is accompanied by the red wine ration, or "piriard." A proposal was made that in addition there be an issue of gruyere cheese. Curiously enough, this proposal came from the deputy for the Jura, the department where most of the gruyere produced in France is made, Before the matter could be discussed, the deputy for the Bas-Rhin, which is part of Alsace, jumped up and, while agreeing with the general principle of the cheese suggestion, advocated the unrivalled vitaininous qualities of minister. He was followed by the deputy for the Aveyron, who argued that it was well known that roquefort contained more nourishment than any other of the French cheeses. Fortunately, the Commission is limited in number, or the deputy for the Cantal would certainly have pressed the claims of the cheese of that name, while the representative of the Calvados, in Normandy, could have drawn attention to the two famous cheeses made by his constituents, eamembert and livarot. In the end the Commission dec.ded that the only possible solution was the status quo.