THOUGHTS OF LEADERS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19981, 24 December 1926, Page 19

THOUGHTS OF LEADERS.

FAULTS OF ENGLISHMEN. SPEECH BY DEAN INGE. MOSCOW PANTOMIME ARTIST. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, November 4. Dr Nansen, in his address as Rector o£ St. Andrew’s University: "It is doubtful whetner there is any proof of the superiority of the so-called ’civilised man’ over liis ’uncivilised’ ancestors. Let us go back some live of six thousand years to the ancient Egyptians. Cun we say honestly that wo feel ourselves superior to them? And if wo go back 12,000 or 15,000 years we find the CroMagnon people, a race certainly in no respect inferior to any of us, with a magnilicient stature, taller than are, 6ft 3in in heignt. and what skulls! Fancy if such a man had the education and knowledge of an undergraduate of our days, what could he not haye made out of life if placed in our hands? Let us be modest. The rising end of evolution which carried our ancestors from the level of the apes to that of the Cro-Magnon people stopped short of modern social life, especially of its urbanisation, which, interfering with the survival of tho fittest, makes the inferior elements of mankind the most prolific. The human race is certainly still changing. Our ethics and morality have developed far beyond the primitive stage so far as individuals go, though certainly not when the individuals combine into groups. Nations have hardly begun as yet to have real morality. They are little more than collections of beasts of prey. Private human virtues, such as unselfishness, charity, love of one s neighbour, the feeling of solidarity, still strike them only too often as ridiculous folly if they are urged to practice them in their policies. "Try not to waste your time doing things you know can be done equally well bv others. Everyone should try and hit upon his- own trail.' I tell you deliverance will come from_ the lonely places. The great reformers in history have come from the wilderness. Are you poor? What luck, you lose no time in looking after your belongings Your flight is not clogged with all those trifles which are now considered the necessities of life. You cannot bo really poor upon this earth. Rooted deep in the nature of every one of us is the spirit of adventure, the call of the wild vibrating under all our actions, making life deeper and higher and nobler. The wild is calling, calling. . . . Let us go.” A LESS MATERIALISTIC SCIENCE.

Sir Oliver Lodge, in his Halley Stewart lecture: — . . ~ ~ “Some human beings, especially the old, live in constant fear of death, which forms a gloomy background to their lives. The burial service is not exhilarating, the disposal of the corpse is a repulsive necessity. It cannot be said that religion has widely removed the element of fear. It is not true that in some not wholly extinct forms it has rather intensified it bv insisting on the hereditary quality of sin and by the doctrine of eternal punishment? To some the doctrine of vicarious atonement has brought comfort, but to many it seems illusory and perhaps even unfair. Fear is a terrible bugbear from which faith and knowledge should free us. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, we are told. I doubt it. It is certainy not the end of wisdom. The love of God is much more helpful. It is possible that the science of the future may rush in and restore confidence and bring consolation where religion has failed. Certainly materialistic science will not do so; but the tendency of the present day is for science to become less materialistic, to realise that after all matter is only something which conspicuously affects the senses, (hat we do not see things as they really are, and that even the material universe may ultimately be found to have an idealistic constitution and be diffused throughout with spiritual reality.” FAULTS OF THE ENGLISHMAN. Doan Inge, at Bishopsgate Institute: — ‘‘On the whole, 1 think we are a lazy people—not only our workmen but also the employers, right through the nation. We might also claim as a national characteristic an absence of vindictiveness, in contrast to the Irishman. I think the theory of our love of fairplay and a capacity for team play has a good deal to do with our national games. Whatever happens to the English nation we shall live in the gratitude of posterity as having invented most ol the good games. First I would put the noble game of cricket. I really think the ideal of playing the game fairly has had a great deal to do with what is best in our national character. ‘‘Our national idea is a very important part of our character. By that I mean that which is the week day religion of every Englishman—that ho is a gentleman. Even a bishop would bo more angry if you told him he was not a gentleman than if you told him he was not a Christian. We have quite got rid of the notion that the ideal of a gentleman is a class distinction. W T e must try, while keeping what is good in our character, to cure ourselves of faults which other nations have found in us—a. tendency to a certain indulgence m eating and drinking; a tendency to sloth and laziness; a tendency to arrogance; and also of that vulgar contempt of intellect, as if wo arc a privileged people whom Providence will see through without our troubling ourselves, thinking clearly and working as hard as other people.” LESSONS FROM GREECE. Mr Baldwin, at the annual meeting of the British School at Athens: ‘‘There are two or three things in Spartan life that I think ought to appeal to all sections of this generation. Fresh from my recollections of last week in the House of Commons, 1 cannot help thinking that the examples the Spartans made of the drunken Helots would appeal to Dr Salter and Lady Astor, and in the same way the alacrity with which some of our modern womanhood are striving now to overtake the modes and the fashions of those girls who took part in the festivals of Greece ought to commend their practices to this generation. Also, how much there is in the Spartans that would appeal to the Fascist! of to-day? September of the year 490 b.c. was to my mind a more cardinal moment of fate for Europe than August, 1914. Western civilisation ns we know it with its merits and its faults, was saved in its infancy at Marathon, and 10 years later by Leonidas and his men at Salamis. Had it not been for that decade, Rome being then in its infancy, there was nothing to prevent Eastern Europe being Orientalised. Had it, therefore, not been for the Greeks, not only could there have been no civilisation as we know it, but wo should all of us have been dark-skinned people with long noses ” LORD BIRKENHEAD ON MR COOK. Lord Birkenhead, at the Engineers’ Club dinner;— “Let us face the plain, indisputable fact. Mr Cook, who is the humble disciple of Lenin, is bound to accept, and does accept, the orders of Moscow. There has never been an occasion in thq whole history of England in which any trade unionist leader who claims allegiance to any considerable body of English workmen has proclaimed and admitted that he was a slave and a serf of a foreign Power. And of what a foreign Power! A foreign Power of whom 1 do dispute and have disputed the right under existing conditions to be recognised at all in this country. Only a fortnight ago meetings assembled at Moscow of Mr Cook’s paymasters, at which they determined the most fruitful lines of Russian activity, and they stated quite plainly—as is their habit, because they despise us—that in two quarters of the world they dis oerned the prospects of _ fruitful advance. The first was by continuing to finance the existing coal dispute, and the second was by exacerbating every conceivable ground of difference in China. Never has such a thing happened in the whole historv of the civilised world. A Czar of Russia would never have dare to say such a thing. “How far has Mr Cook sustained his position? We know his objects; we know his principles, and we know the financial inducements that operate in his mind. Nevertheless, we find that the federation has failed to control the industry. We find that more than a quarter of the men who get the coal on which this country depends have refused to obey his orders, and we find that after five months’ incredible patience on the part of the Government his last effort is to try to order the safety men to come from the mines in order to destroy the whole fabric on which the existence of the mines depend. No greater proof could he given that that he is earning th" money that Moscow has paid him.— Cheers.) We have to fall hack in such a case upon the traditions and the courage of a great people, and I say plainly that, having in four years defeated the greatest menace that has ever threatened our existence, greater than ch* challenge of Louis XIV, are we going really in the end to he defeated by a M-r*ow pantomime artist?”

POLITICIANS AS JOURNALISTS. Lord Beaverbrook, before the Head Teachers Association : “The curious tiling is how little aptitude even the cleverest or greatest of politicians show for journalism. We must not let the dazzling success of Mr Churchill blind us to the fact that he is an almost complete exception. Neither oratory nor wit in themselves make a good contributor —it_ is Mr Churchill alone who has had the third gift bestowed on him by the fairies. Mr Lloyd George is the greatest orator I have over heard —and no one would say that his private conversation was dull. Yet his written articles are by no means on a level with his spoken words. Lord Birkenhead is the wittiest man whom 1 have ever met. And who will be found to deny his oratorical power? Yet his efforts in contemporary journalism leave me cold. The- are like great slabs of rice pudding interspersed with a few streaks of the real jam. His essays are excellent, but he has never applied himself with sufficient care and energy tc popular journalism to succeed in it. “Thirdly, 1 take the case of Lord Oxford. His journalism is thoroughly dull. But as I never cared for his oratory in the Commons, nor knew him in private life, the test hardly applies. It is obvious, however, that you may be an cx-Premier and yet fail in journalism—but not through lack of desire.” EMPIRE SENTIMENT AND EMPIRE TRADE. Sir R. Horne, at a meeting of the Empire Industries’ Association: — “The one bright spot in the abysmal state of the country’s industries is the amount of trade which is being taken by our dominions. If we wish to save ourselves from possible disaster in the future we must look to the markets of our own dominions rather than carry on flirtations with other countries, all of whom are our comnetitors, and many of whom are our deadly enemies. “Wo retain over 160.000 of our population more than we d: ’ before the war. If this state of affairs is not remedied we shall be faced with perpetual unemployment, which will worsen from year to year instead of getting better. The only remedy is a great scheme of Empire emigration. We have the best workmen in the world, and we are not employing them. We have the most adaptable settlers in the world, and we are not using them. The most important thing for us to _do is to add to the ties of Empire sentiment the ties of Empire trade. ’* INDIA AND THE EMPIRE. The Maharaja Bahadur of Burdwan, at the British Indian Union luncheon: — “India’s peculiar position make it difficult sometimes to represent its views at the Imperial Conference, but India’s connection with fhe conference is all for her good. The Indian Empire is the only one out of which the King gets the title of Emperor, but I hope the Indian example will some day make the British Sovereign Emperor of all the dominions. When Lord Reading went to India he found that loose speeches made in this country at the time of the introduction of the reforms had given to Indians of the more emotional type a quite different impression from what was really meant. Ho found the services in revolt, including the Indian elements, because they all thought there was no security. Lord Reading’s statesmanship helped him to win back those services, and to rally round him those Indians who believe in British rule, and if his term of office has done nothing else it has belied the charges made by the author of the book, ‘The Lost Dominion. Indian is not a lost dominion; has a great future under British rule.” MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING. General Hertzog, on the same occasion: “To know one another is to understand not only the greatness and strength, but the weakitess and the disappointments of one another. When we have reached that stage as nations and as individuals a great many of the misunderstands and a great manv of the quarrels and bickerings will cease. That is why I appreciate this gathering of us here at the Imperial Conference. If it were merely to know how to solve the big and important problems with which the Empire has to deal and with which we have to deal, we might perhaps as sufficiently and in a short space of time settle them all by correspondence. But it seems to mo we are hero not merely to know those problems, but to have that contact with one another which gives us (Re necessary confidence and understanding of one another which will make the work that we are called upon to do all the utmost lasting. It is for that reason I am so glad that South Africa and India have been trying of late to come to closer contact with one another. Wo have had our differences in the past—certainly not quarrels, but differences of considerable importance to India, to South Africa, and also to the Empire. Well, so far as those differences are concerned I feel convinced that with a better understanding of one another —of one another’s requirements and outlook—and with the will to do that which should be done as between friends and as between nations who desire to stand over against one another as friends we shall come to the conclusion that we are prepared to see one another s requirements and as far as possible, to meet them. I am prepared to say that we have no fear that these difficulties and problems will not be eventually settled t° the sat>s ; . faction of the one as well as of the other. BRITISH PUBLICISTS IN AMERICA. Sir A. Moud, M.P., on bis return from the United States and Canada: “It is intolerable that business men like myself, in our negotiations with American corporations on matters vital to Great Britain, should be hampered by people like Dean Inge, who have had no experience in finance or commerce. -It. is difficult for me to express how harmful an effect has been created by Dean Inge a statements when he was in New York. I met leading financiers, bankers, and industrialists there, and found a defeatist atmosphere which it was difficult to dispel. The American newspapers, after the dean’s pronouncements, described Europe as doomed and Great Britain as certain to be destroyed. Americans today seem confident of the decadence of Europe and, of their own overwhelming superiority in every field of finance and industry, and it is almost criminal for Englishmen to assist in spreading that impression. "Another thing that was spoken of to me by leading American financiers was the folly on the part of some British publicists in whining about the American debt repayment. They assured me that that was the last way in the world—and I was able to confirm this —to obtain anything from America, and it is entirely destroying the great impression which was created, and which was of inestimable value to British credit, by the way we unflinchingly took up the burden of the debt. In fact, this kind of attack is seriously endangering Anglo-American relations, and that was said to me by one of the leading international bankers in New York.”