NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 24011, 8 July 1941, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

DRIVING FORCE OF IDEAS The fatalistic attitude of mind which encourages the belief that there is a GrPsham's Law in the realm ot ideas as in matters of currency, that the bad must inevitably corrupt the good, is plain defeatism, says the News-Letter. Evil will prevail only if there is no belief in the good. It is the first duty of statesmanship to define the goal of humanity and the means by which man can hope to reach it. Those who scoff at the potency of ideas would do well to ponder over the devastating effect produced by Lenin—smuggled into Russia during the last war by the Germans 1 on his war-weary countrymen; the effect of subversive Nazi propaganda in neutral countries and in France during the first year of the present war; and the more recent successes of Goebbels in the Balkans and Irak. What is needed is an effective antidote to this poison, and it is this for which people throughout the world are waiting.

PROSPERING THROUGH EVIL The whole record of man's spiritual experience as reflected, for example, in the Bible, shows how a fundamental doubt runs through all the centuries, writes Dr. Sidney M. Berry. The recurring problem is the power and prosperity which evil is able to command, and by contrast the apparent helplessness of the forces of good. There is no doubt expressed in life and literature to-day which cannot be found in some vivid sentence in the Bible. Evidently, then, this doubt is not an easy one to reckon with. On the short view there will always seem to be an advantage which evil possesses, and if life were like a hundred yards race, where the objective is near at hand, it might be difficult to justify the confidence that the triumph of evil is always an illusion. It is from that short view that most of the doubts arise. Our need is to remember that the greatest things in life can never bo measured by the short view. It is not, possible by taking a cross-scction of lifo at any time to discover all the forces which aro at work determining the issue of events. It is only given to men of deep insight to see that the successes which are won by falsehood only last as long as the short tenure of a lie, and that, the apparently imposing edifice of any system is to bo tested not by its superstructure, but by its foundations.

THE GERMANS IN HISTORY In his "Short History of the Germans," Dr. Edgar Stern-Rubarth, who writes as "a Liberal, a democrat and a European born by chance within the boundaries of Germany," sets out "to consider the German people from the side of their inherited, indelible characteristics." These characteristics, he holds, are those of the savage, immoral, cruel and treacherous Germanic tribes as they first appear in history. For him, with the Nazi regimo, "the wheel comes full circle" and tho present war is one of "savages against civilisation," as in the days of the break-up of the Roman Empire, With this latter view it is impossible to quarrel, says the Times Literary Supplement. Bnt, from tho historian's point of view, the question is: What were the causes that hindered the growth of a stable civilisation in Germany while other Germanic

tribes, equally barbarous, were destined to build up ordered national States in France and England P One cause, and that not the least, was the indelible instinct of the Germans for domination, which made the German kings neglect their own country while they pursued a shadowy Imperial crown in Italy and so led to the victory of the forces of feudal disruption in Germanv which, complicated by tribal, dynastic and religious rivalries, culminated in the ruin and destruction of the Thirty Years' War. This war not only plunged Germany back into barbarism; it left the country split up into some hundreds of sovereign States, big and little, although a shadowy Empire survived. Unfortunately for Germany and the world, of these States—--38 of which survived the Napoleonic wars —the only one able to forge the country into unity was Prussia, militarist and aggressive by tradition. For German patriotic writers, Hegel and Fichte during the War of Liberation and Treitschke later, Prussia embodied the ideal of the Divinely constituted State; and, although the Prussians were disliked by other Germans and their dictatorial methods resented, all Germanv, outside Austria, bowed to the yoke willingly enough, since it meant national unity and strength. Thus Germany became Prussianised, the process being completed under the Nazi tyranny.

THE ROLE OF SCIENCE There are some minds -who regard science as the villain of the present age, said Viscount Samuel in the House of Lords. But, whatever views may be held on that fundamental issue, this much at least is certain, that, if one philosophy of life enlisted science in its support, and the opposite philosophy repudiated it or neglected it, when the matter came to open conflict the issue could not be in doubt. If hero in this country we had no science, and if in Germany science was highly developed, then we should already m this war have been beaten and conquered; and if with us science had in the previous generations been carried to an even higher degree than it has, then perhaps there would have been less anxiety than has prevailed. This subject is not some side-issue and a matter for prips and pedants, but in the conduct ot the war it is the very essence of the whole issue.