NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23699, 4 July 1940, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

THE GOOD OLD DAYS Mr. Winston Churchill has held many high offices of State, but never before two at once and even as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence his salary is insignificant beside the emoluments at one time enjoyed by his famous ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough, notes "Lueio" in the Manciiestcr Guardian. In the days when he rode the whirlwind and directed the stornv "Marlbrook" drew £IO,OOO a year as General of the English Forces, £3OOO as Master of Ordnance, £2OOO as a colonel of the Guards, and £7OOO as a British plenipotentiary, together with a pension of £SOOO, £1825 for travelling expenses, £IOOO as a kind of messing allowance, and an additional £IO,OOO from the States General of Holland —a comfortable total of £39,825 a year. At the same time the Duchess, as Groom of the Stole, Ranger of Windsor Park, Mistress of thej. Robes, and Keeper of the Privy Purse to Queen Anne, was drawing another £7OOO toward the household expenses. TAKING THE LONG VIEW

A war on which the future of democratic institutions riot only in Europe but throughout the world depends is not to be judged by incidents but by the cumulative effects which are obtained by the belligerents, says Sir Archibald Hurd in a letter to the Times. The issue of the struggle of 1914-18 was not decided by the unfortunate Antwerp expedition, the early successes of the German Army, which eventually threatened Paris and occupied the greater part of Belgium, including the ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge, or by the sinking of three British battleships, 10 cruisers, four gunboats, three destroyers, six submarines, and many smaller, men-of-war in the first six months. The aggressor, making his preparations for months, or even years, ahead, always has the advantage of the initiative, as does the criminal, whether murderer or burglar, before the law can intervene and inflict punishment. Germany is imitating the methods of the gangsters, and Americans know how difficult it is to deal with them.

SERVING DEMOCRACY If there is one conclusion to -which human experience unmistakably points it is that democratic ends demand democratic methods for their realisation, writes Professor John Dewey, the American thinker, in his book, "Freedom and Culture." Authoritarian methods now offer themselves to us in new guises. They come to us claiming to servo the ultimate ends of freedom and equity in a classless society. Or they recommend adoption of a totalitarian regime in order to fight totalitarianism. In whatever form they offer themselves, they owe their seductive power to their claim to servo ideal ends. Our first defenco is to realise that democracy can be served only by the slow day by day adoption and contageous diffusion in every phase of our common life of methods that are identical with the ends to bo reached and that recourse to monistic, wholesale,' absolutist procedures is a betrayal of human freedom, no matter in what guiso it present* itself. An American democracy can serve the world only as it demonstrates in the conduct of its own life the efficacy of plural, partial and experimental methods in securing and maintaining an everincreasing release of the powers of human nature, in service of a freedom which is co-operative and a cooperation which is voluntary.