NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23767, 21 September 1940, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

LEADERSHIP AND SERVICE "The two factors which seem vital to the success of the national servMce of youth which we have set out to establish are leadership and service," said the president of the British Board of Education, Mr. H. Ramsbotham, in a message to the conference of the National Association of Boys' Clubs at Nottingham. "Leadership is essential, and much of it must spring from the corporate life of youth itself. This intangible quality, so hard to define, manifests itself in the capacity to give unselfishly of one's best and to evoke the best that is in others. In that way true leadership is differentiated from the totalitarian brand against which we are lighting. Service is an expression of the human urge to give rather than to receive. It is a strong element in the make-up of British youth, and the days of trial through which we are passing and which lie ahead afford excellent opportunities of appealing to youth's impulse to serve." PHYSICAL' TRAINING.

"Day by day we reaii with pride of the deeds of skill and valour performed by our young men in the air and on the sea," said Viscount Dawson of Penri, the eminent physician, speaking in the House of Lords 011 the need for a universal scheme of physical training. "These young men are selectively trained, they can indulge in their own individuality, they each have their own initiative and enterprise, and they are all within the compass of a common discipline. In contrast we have to turn and contemplate large numbers of youths employed in industry, their bodies lacking shape and vigour, their minds lacking aim and purpose. They are drifting. If I may add 'to that, we have proved by experiments many times that if we take groups of these youths in the second category, and put them into camps, give them adequate food, give them physical training, afford them opportunities for games and recreation and give them community life, in a very few months they will add an inch or more to their stature, two inches round their chest, a stone in weight. That is an eloquent fact. That shows that our youths do not lack great potentialities. What they lack is opportunity." HENRY VIII. TO GLADSTONE One of the favourite methods of propaganda in Germany and Italy is to accuse particular British statesmen of being "war-mpngers" and to distinguish them from the general body of British opinion, says the Manchester Guardian. A Fascist newspaper, disappointed with the cold welcome that Hitler's appeal to reason has received applies this method in a new way. Britain's present rulers are contrasted with her past rulers. We are told that Henry VIII. Cromwell, Pitt, Disraeli and Gladstone would all have accepted Hitler's offer. It would not be easy to find any subject on which all of these eminent men would-have been agreed, but it happens that the Fascist newspaper has chosen an issue on which they , would undoubtedly have been united, though their motives might not have been precisely the same in all cases. Henry VIII., whom Gladstone called a great but a bad man, would have been as certain as Gladstone to refuse an arrangement that left one Power absolute master of Europe. His sudden changeover from an alliance with Spain, to an alliance with France after the Battle of Pavia was due to Wolsey's conviction that British interests would suffer if a single Power was strong enough to dictate to Europe. An historian has said that. it was at this point in British history that the balance 'of power appeared as a principle of .foreign policy. Gladstone u;ould have refused Hitler's offer from his: respect for "the wider interests of mankind," to which he devoted his great series of Midlothian speeches.