NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23325, 19 April 1939, Page 12

NOTES AND COMMENTS

SELLING IN ORDER TO BUY "The importance of exports to such a great trading nation as we British are, can be well understood," said Lord Dudley, chairman of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, in a recent broadcast talk. "Wo must export to live. Consider for a moment the enormous quantities of goods Britain buys from other countries: in the year 1938 her total imports were worth more than a thousand million pounds—and they must be paid for. No nation can continue to buy /it such a rate unless it is finding markets for its own products. Business, whether for nations or manufacturers or shopkeepers, is a matter of goodwill and give and take. We British can only keep up our purchases from other countries if they also will buy from us."

VOYAGE TO THE MOON It may be of interest to listeners to learn that journeys to the nearer planets are well within the scope of present-day engineering technique, says Mr. William F. Temple, writing to the Listener for the British Interplanetary Society. A return trip to the moon in a rocket-propelled vessel is possible today at a cost of a few hundred thousand pounds. It is not difficult to demonstrate that all the materials and technical knowledge necessary are available or can bo easily obtained. Bearing in mind the value of the knowledge and resources to be derived from interplanetary travel, the cost seems moderate enough. No one to-day grudges the cost of the discovery of America. It is possible, therefore, that interplanetary travel may bo achieved in the next decade or so, unless civilisation is overwhelmed by the war with which it has recently been threatened.

COMPULSORY SERVICE I cannot help feeling that the Germans still have the impression that, no matter what material armament we British may he accumulating, as a nation wo will never stand for compulsory service in peacetime, and therefore we shall really be untrained to use these resources on a national scale in war, writes a. correspondent to the Times. In short, the Germans believe that, although material equipment may exist, the moral will to use this equipment is as absent as it was before rearmament started. If we could show them that this was not so, and that their continued aggressive actions had led us to submit to what we would never have tolerated previously—i.e., compulsory service—the effect of such a token of sacrifice would be of transcending importance, and might well play an important part in averting the catastrophe against which wo are all preparing. To my mind compulsory service has two main aspects: —(a) The part it would enable us to play on the outbreak of war. (h) The part it may play in preventing war.

GOD AND THE MACHINE At the Industrial Christian Fellowship convention on "This Present World" at Birmingham, the Rev. J. L. V. Casserley, whoso subject was "The Position of Man in the World To-day," said:—-"There is a gradual decay, and atrophy in this modern world of the creative capacity of man. He gets more and more accustomed to fitting his capacity into that of the machine. Less and less men express themselves as creators in their work or their leisure. From the mechanical work they turn to mechanical leisure, in such forms as the cinema and the wireless set. The creative capacities are decaying in the modern world. This is a very serious matter, for as long as men have a link with creative faculties they have a link with the Creator; the gospel of the Creator rings true, because they know also in a simple way what it is to create. In an age. when craftsmanship, personal initiative, are everywhere required and where creative faculties are alive, tho gospel of God the Creator is naturally a gospel their minds allow them to accept. But in an ago of mechanism, in which men merely attend the machine, very naturally they grow to accept the philosophies of life which seem fundamentally mechanical. These men know that these machines work blindly and it fits in with a mechanised experience of lifo to regard the powers above them as working blindly."

NEW MANNERS FOR OLD The latest reform in Turkey is a Government ruling that the manners and etiquette of Western society aro to bo taught generally in schools. TTho reason for this, apparently, is that Turkey, proceeding on that path of rapid Westernisation laid down by tho late Kernel Ataturk, has lost her old Eastern code of manners and finds some difficulty in acquiring a new one. Eastern manners spring from a time when every person's place in tho social scheme was strictly ordered, usually by his birth, so that precise tulcs could bo laid down for any typo of encounter or occasion. Such a system of manners is necessarily complex, yet easy to follow, onco you have learnt it, since its actions aro all clearly prescribed. The social structure it assumes is hierarchical; everyone, except tho highest ruler and tho humblest slave, has a superior above him and an inferior below. Hence when two persons meet, in a social sense,, they meet not as human beings, but as social functionaries, each knowing exactly what is required of him. This kind of system, however, is bound to break down as soon as society ceases to bo governed by immutable rules of caste and precedence —in fact, as soon as a democratic spirit is born. But fon the freedom thus gained, the new opportunities for every one to make his way in the world and the recognition of a common humanity transcending social divisions, a price has to bo paid. Jf persons are to discard their social uniforms when they. meet, they can no longer rely on a rigid social code and must derive their manners from their own resources of feeling and judgment. For young Turkish students, therefore, the point will be to regard Western manners, not merely as a sot of peculiar conventions, but rather as an attempt to pass beyond conventions altogether and to achieve a social behaviour which expresses simply tho courteous respect which every human being should feel for every other. These students, surveying the present state of Europe, could hardly be blamed if they were to conclude that Western courtesy is nowadays in very poor repute, if not heading rapidly for extinction.