TEST OF FRIENDSHIP

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19206, 24 June 1924, Page 8

TEST OF FRIENDSHIP

YOUTHS’ PROVING -GROUNDS. MR KIPLING’S ADDRESS. LONDON, June 12. How youth knows its friends and proVes them was the theme of an address by Mr Rudyard Kipling in a speech at the annual dinner of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust at Oxford. ‘ Ho said that Cecil Rhodes’s plan was to get , students in many countries to knock up against one another. “The knowledge how far a man may bo trusted to pull off a losing game is acquired only in the merciless intimacy of one’s early years,” he declared. “After that one has to guess at the worth of one's friends and enemies. But youth, which sometimes knows almost as much about something as it thinks it knows about everything, can apply its own tests on its own proving grounds, aud it does not forget the results. “Rhodes and Jameson did not draw together impersonally over the abstract idea of Imperial service; they tried each other out long before across the poker tables in the Kimberley Club; beside friends’ deathbeds; and among the sudden and desperate emergencies of life on the diamond fields. “Therefore, when their work began, neither had to waste time reading up the other’s references.”