NOT DOWN AND OUT.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20361, 19 March 1928, Page 3

NOT DOWN AND OUT.

UNIVERSITY PRINCIPAL AS AN OPTIMIST. Mr C. Grant Robertson, principal of Birmingham University, in a speech reported in the Birmingham Post, which is in strong contrast to many pessimistic utterances made to-day, said: “ Why should people make everyone so depressed by imagining this country is helplessly backward and being outdistanced in all her industries? In a great many ways it is very unjust to this country, and unduly unjust to other countries. We are not down and out; we have not lost brains, energy and enterprise. “ We are going to maintain our position in the world, and we need not bo afraid of competition, although it means hard work. We have had plenty of competition in the past, and shall have plenty in the future. 1 believe in my countrymen. I see a great deal of them, and I do not think the present generation, the young generation, of Englishmen is inferior to the generation to which I belong. “ When he looked bark over his contemporaries of the past 30 years, and prepared a wreckage chart of those sunk on the way to the harbour and those who reached their harbour, ho generally found the reasons belonged to the persons, and not in any way to luck. Those who went down failed because they did not stick to it. They were not going to succeed if they imagined some were lucky and that things dropped into their lap. They didn’t. Good luck was nothing more than having the capacity to see an opportunity and make use of it.”