NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23136, 7 September 1938, Page 12

NOTES AND COMMENTS

MIGRANT TIDE TURNS The Overseas Settlement Board seems to think it is a passing accident that the stream of migration within tho Empire is now flowing in tho opposite direction to its accepted and historical course, writes Mr. H. V. Hodson, editor of tho Round Table. The figures are illuminating. The total net immigration into the United Kingdom between 1930 and 1936 was 410,000. In the six years following 1930 the net immigration actually exceeded the net emigration of the six years before that transitional date. These figures include foreign migrants and the very substantial number who have crossed from Ireland. But even the figures as between the United Kingdom and the Dominions show that the former is still an immigrant country and has continued so through good times as well as bad.

COAL VERSUS FUEL OIL The committee set up by tho British Government to examine the possibility of increasing tho amount of coal used by shipping, has now reported not unhopefully, says the Spectator. Since 1914. of course, tho inroads made by oil have been enormous. In that year the world's tonnage was 45.4 millions, of which 96.6 per cent was coal-fired. In July, 1937, total tonnage had risen to 65.27 millions, but the percentage using coal had fallen to 48.6. Thus the actual decline in the tonnage using coal is rather more than a quarter, but much less than a third. On board fast passenger ships and' liners the use of oil fuel is well established for a number of reasons more or less irrespective of cost. At the other end it seems agreed that Diesel engines are tho most economical for small ships up to 1300 tons. But there is a very largo intermediate class —cargo liners and tramps —in which it still pays to uso coal. To conservo and extend this footing for home-produced fuel, the committee suggest three requisites—a lower price, A stable price, and reliable quality. REVELATION JN ART

"The scientist is given tho credit for being a specialist in truth," said Mr. Eric Newton, the art critic, in a recent broadcast talk. "But how often is tho artist given the credit for a specialist in beauty ? Not often, I am afraid —not tho modern artist, at any' rate. We all feel quite confident of two things. We think that we know what things look like, and we think we know what is beautiful and what is ugly when we see it. In actual fact, most of us have only the vaguest idea of what things look like, and our ideas of beauty are entirely dependent on what is presented to us by artists and how it is presented. Do we know the colour of tho shadow of a cloud on a distant hillside? Or tho difference in tone between the red of a tiled roof and tho red of a sunset? No, we don't know any of these things until the artist shows them to us. It was Turner who taught us how to look as sunsets; Constable who showed us the sparkle of a tree's foliage. Van Gogh discovered the rich yellow of corn in sunlight, Cezanne discovered the way cftie plane interlocks with another. Until they taught us how to look at nature we simply did not know what certain aspects of nature were like. So let us not bo too sure of ourselves when we tell an artist that ho is untrue to nature."

ENGLISH COUNTRY MARKET No one can understand the West Country—so it seemed to me last week —who has not been to Barnstaple Market, writes Sir W. Beach Thomas. It is eloquent of a form of cultivation as well as marketing that belongs to its own district. There is a simplicity and naturalness about the whole affair that seem to belong to a less complicated civilisation than prevails elsewhere. The people bring to the market just what they have got to sell, however few or small the things may be. All down the chief corridor of the fine market-hall —lit. as well as an artist's studio —are spread out for sale little collections of produce, each representing a small unit of cultivaiton. There were raspberries and very late strawberries, vegetables of many sorts and kinds, baskets of eggs, trussed poultry and flowers of great variety and beauty; and to collections of tho more serious articles of salo would be added, in this collection and that, one little bouquet of marigolds or one halfsized rabbit. Most buyers were women armed with capacious baskets, filled up by degrees in a friendly, leisurely fashion. The goods were cheap and fresh and honestly presented, not soiled and staled by passage through a wholesale market and much handling on train or lorry. Nor was this all. Tho entrance and some of the bays of tho market-hall aro well packed with local crafts. Where would you buy better baskets or better earthenware? And the prices are apt to persuade you to buy more than you can take away I

WOMEN GIVE LIFE ITS VALUES

"Work, whether successful or no, is not an end in itself," said Miss Mary Agnes Hamilton, in a talk broadcast from Daventry. "It is a means. The end is that odd elusive thing wo call life. What is called success, in terms of money and prominence, personal importance, being 'talked about,' being too busy to have any time to think these are not tho things that make for fulness of life. Indeed, only too often, they hamper its growth. It is the immaterial things—friendship, kindness and sympathy for all that live, human and animal, contact with the treasures created for us by the artists, apprehension of the unseen, spiritual forces that underlie the bustlo and noiso of daily existence, freedom for tho adventures of the mind —it is these things that aro tho ends for which we live. And with these things the women in the homo have everything to do. Their development, their growth, their quiet enjoyment, depend, mainly, on women; and depend, abovo all, on tho homekeeping women. Women, partly by instinct, partly by this circumstance—that they are concerned with tho home in which life goes on—have a sense of the significance of life itself, as the end of human effort, which is often buried and overlaid in men. Men have to strain after power and achievement; women can have to pause and ask: 'What is it for?' It is sometimes thought that it is a weakness in women that tho strain after power is rare in their make-up. But I believe it is, in fact, a strength, and that tho world needs nothing so much as to be reminded, by them, what it is all for."