NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23954, 2 May 1941, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

PROTEINS AND CARBOHYDRATES Much misconception prevails as to where the need for meat (or other proteid foods) is greatest, says "Scrutator,"' writing in the Sunday Times. It is less required for "doing hard work" than for growing. Adolescents need it more than adults. A young soldier, who under the Army's physical training is visibly expanding his chest and muscles day by day, needs as much of it as lie can get. An older man doing hard physical work will fare better on plenty of carbohydrates. The irisli navvy devouring mountains of potato is the model for him. But at every turn large allowance must be made for people's habits. In diet you cannot easily teach an old dog new tricks. Your food benefits you more if you like it. Relishes have genuine importance, as those who lament the vanished onion may realise. ARMY EXPLETIVES BANNED Another United States Army tradition —that of the hard-boiled top sergeant who emphasised all his verbal directions with expletives—disappears with the training of the selective service troops of 1010-11, notes the Christian Science Monitor. An official order has been posted at various camps forbidding the use of profanity to pune'tuate commands in the presence of recruits. Doubtless some cynical veterans will be inquiring whether they should tip their hats and say, "Please, sir," when ordering a "rookie" around. Seriously, the change marks a great forward step; for officers at Fort Devens said the order resulted from letters written home by young soldiers who disapproved of the language used by "non-coms." This means that the Army has a hotter class of recruit than formerly—one who feels he does not have to he sworn at to make him an efficient soldier. And since recruits are a crosssection of young American manhood, the incident indicates an improvement in morals and manners. DEMOCRACY OR "SLAVOCRACY" The welfare of the many has been tacitly accepted as the aim of economic activity in the democracies—"the I'leonomics of Welfare." This system, writes an American journalist, has grown strong on the theory of the worth of the individual, the value of every human personality to the general scheme of things, the importance of each man and woman in the broader plan. The totalitarian system dethrones the individual and sets up tho State as supreme. Collectivism takes tho place of individualism. Men are mere cogs in the machine: it is tho machine that is all-important. The Nazi-Fascist ideologies conceive of supermen united ii; supernal ions—hence a world of masters and slaves, "slavocracy." This aim can be accomplished only through "the Economics, of Force." So we sec the Economics of Welfare, the ideal of the democracies, irrevocably and unalterably opposed to t lie Economics of Force, the ideology of the dictatorships, And there is war between the two. Tho dictators are out to prove the folly and fallacy of the democratic ideal, to disprove the notion that government should serve the people, and to establish their idea that the people should serve the Government, that the welfare of the people is unimportant as compared with the welfare of tho State.