NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23178, 26 October 1938, Page 12

NOTES AND COMMENTS

HABIT A SAVIOUR If people did not do most things by habit, life would become a torment, said Dr. Alan Maberlcy in an address to the British Social Hygiene Council. When infants first started to walk it required an immense effort, but if they had not acquired that habit and had to think of every step they took, they could imagine how troublesome and irksome life would bo. If a man had to think of every movement when he was shaving, as he did at the beginning, life would be unbearable, but through habit he now had ten minutes of fantasy. Intuition was something very different from instinct. A man might think something out after two hours of logical reasoning, but his wifo would often exclaim, "Oh, I thought that out in two minutes." She would probably be right, but she had no idea how she arrived at that conclusion. The intermediate stages of that intuition were not known, but the result was as if something had been thought out.

BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY An admirable summary of British foreign policy is made by Professor Harold Teinperlev and Miss Lillian M. Penson in their history, "The Foundations of British Policy from Pitt (1792) to Salisbury (1002)." They state:—Despite opposed factions, and even opposed policies, the continuity of ideas in British diplomacy is striking. The famous State pa*pcr written bv Sir Eyre Crowe on January 1, 1907, reproduces what are virtually Canning s ideas on foreign policy eighty years before. Most of tho assumptions underlying these views were accepted by all statesmen from Pitt to Salisbury, though their methods of application and interpretation may have differed. Tho balance of power, the sanctity of treaties, the danger of extending guarantees, the value of non-intervention, the implications of what Castlereagh called "a system of government strongly popular and national in its character" were understood by all.

NOT ALWAYS GOOD COIN One might illustrate the continuity of British foreign policy from a different point of view in showing how and why Continental States have often failed to understand the difference between British policy and the first first emotional reactions of British opinion to important European questions, writes Mr. K. Ij. Woodward in the Spectator. Sir Robert Morier—one of the ablest British diplomatists of his' time —wrote in 1870: "If we look at the questions relating to Poland, and Italy, and Denmark, what really happened was that a sort of strong and violent public sympathy, expressing itself in public meetings, and so forth, reacted upon the imagination of foreigners and the people concerned. So as to make them believe that what a public meeting, with a popular chairman, in England, decided, would be ratified by Parliament. We forget altogether, or we do not sufficiently consider, that what a great free people like the people of England expresses vociferously at a public meeting, people abroad take for good coin." It would be hard to put more concisuly one of the factors affecting the position and prestige of England in Europe during the decade before 1937.

HEALTH AND EMOTIONS For generations it has been accepted, not only in medical circles, that sticli emotions as anxiety, horror, hate, anger and their opposites can, and do, have a profound effect upon actual bodily processes, writes the medical correspondent of the Spectator. Such popular phrases as "sick with fear'' and "laugh and grow fat" are evidences of the common-sense, popular recognition of this truth. Nor has the vast increase in our knowledge of the "workings" of the human body tended to diminish the importance of the mental or emotional factor in affecting health and producing disability. Biochemistry has merely shown us that the manifestations of fear, for example, arc associated with the release of a more than ordinary amount of the internal secretion of one or two particular endocrine glands that are in turn under the control of others, just as radiography has demonstrated that, in a "nervous" person, the unexpected banging of a door can cause the stomach to drop several inches. Ihe practical fact remains that an uneasy mind may be associated with a ver> large variety of minor or even major illnesses or deviations from normal health, and that the resolution of some anxiety, fear or anger may result in a restoration, for instance, of good digestion, sloep and an ordinary pulserate. FEVER AT NUREMBERG While the Chancelleries of Europe are confronted with the gravest crisis since the war, the spirit of Nazi Germany flows through the ancient streets of Nuremberg like a river that has burst its dams, writes Miss Virginia Cowlcs in recording her impressions of the Nazi Congress at Nuremberg last month. A million red, white and black swastikas flutter from the window ledges, and the city, which has swollen to threo tinus its normal size, resounds to the ring of leather boots and blazes with a bewildering array of uniforms. Although the vast regimentation of modern Germany is a phenomenon which only the machine ago could produce, at night the medieval background of Nuremberg becomes curiouslv real. The clock swings back to the Middle Ages. The long red pennants fluttering from the turretcd walls of tho castle shine in the moonlight like the standards of an old religious war; the tramp of marching feet and tho chorus of voices chanting the militant Nazi hymns suggest all the passion of an ancient crusade. Tt is only whan you hear the sudden whine of a silver-winged fighter travelling at hundreds of miles an hour that you are jerked back to the grim reality of 1938. That grim realitv has cast its shadow over tho Party Congress. Tho faces of tho politician*}, tho diplomats and press correspondents are strained and anxious. In tho Grand Hotel you see members of tho Italian Embassy in earnest conversation with General Franco's delegates, you seo German party leaders talking to the Japanese, the French cornered with tho British. Tho newspaper correspondents from most of the capitals of Kurope wander through the lobbies, putting questions and exclnnging information, while messenger boys dash up with cablegrams and the telephones ring continuously from Berlin and Loudon and Paris.