DEFEATING THE DEPRESSION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21542, 14 January 1932, Page 3

DEFEATING THE DEPRESSION

NEEDS OF THE TIMES EDUCATION, THRIFT, AND HARD WORK 1 ADDRESS TO UNIVERSITY SENATE In his address to the annual meeting of the senate of the University of New Zealand, which was commenced in the Allen Hall yesterday morning, the chancellor (Professor J. Macmillan Brown spoke at some length on the straitened conditions of the country at the present time, and suggested several means by which the Dominion might expect ultimately to rehabilitate its shaken fortunes. Education, the fertilising of youthful talent, the practice of thrift and industry and the complete and full development of the primary industries by research and progress were among the factors which he considered important in the future of the country. ! . “ Though history never repeats itself exactly,” commenced Professor Macmillan Brown, “ there is a striking parallelism to be found between ages and communities in their development. In order to understand a phenomenon that seems exceptional, the first and most logical step to take is to trace out similar happenings in other regions and periods, and to determine wherein they differ in environment and causes. The existing depression is an instance to the point; it has sent all thinking men to the past, especially the immediate past, to find consolation and some basis for predicting its course and its probable end, ' and_ still more to find some remedy for the ills it has caused. THE UNITY OF MANKIND. “The most remarkable feature of this depression is its universality,” he continued, “it stretches round the world, missing not even the most primitive and isolated communities like the archipelagoes and islands of the Pacific Ocean. For the first time in the history of the world it has brought out the essential unity of mankind and his intrests. _ It has acted like the pneumonic epidemic of 1918 and taken the spirit out of even the most vigorous and enterprising community. America and Europe, East and West, are at last felt to be one in fluctuations and destiny. This human unity is the goal towards which we now can see all history has been evolving. For the first time we begin to realise that there is an evolution of the whole human race in process. Hitherto we have recognised it at work only in sections of our race. Now we feel that where one is affected, the health of all the rest is involved. “ It is impossible for any community however large and self-centred to isolate itself and follow its own destiny without regard to the events and movements that are shaking other centres. The world is at last an organism with all its parts linked up, though not to a central will, to a central heart and brain by a nervous and circulatory system that is almost as delicate and unifying as that of the human Tbody. For ages every new Empire and every new religion aimed at this and failed, some just at the point where it seemed to be in sight of achievement, coming to grips with a rival inspired by the same ambition. It has come about almost naturally by the_ growth of industry and commerce, aided by _ science and invention, and guided by self-interest.

DISARMAMENT. “ There is no turning back now and there is no possibility of wrecking the economy of this interdependence,” said the chancellor. “The central brain and heart are still embryonic in The Hague Court and the League of Nations. They are the first infantile effort to lead mankind to settle its disputes without resort to war. For war mutilates and destroys the nervous and circulatory systems and is the primary cause of those infertile periods of depression, one of which we are at present passing through. _lt destroys the capital or accumulations of thrift which constitute the first essential of all industrial and commercial progress, the others being industry, intelligence, forethought, and mutual confidence. It breeds those fears and suspicions that are the bases and cues of all wars, and so it compels the erection of those defences and barriers, armaments and tariffs, which obstruct and disease the circulatory system. The beginning of the cure of this epidemic is the removal of those fears and suspicions. And that cannot be accomplished till the proofs and signs of their existence, the armed barriers and defences, are removed. Disarmament is the first step towards the revival of that mutual confidence which ie the primary basis of all industrial and commercial intercourse. , LIBERTY.

Man first became man when he learned to foresee the evils and emergencies that lay before him and began to take measures to provide agifinst them, he said. In other words, when he learned thrift and the foresight that is implied in it. But the bee and the ant had been before him in this. What obetrusted their further development was their minute size and the lack of the hands and the facilities to creat new things or combinations of things, and especially new capacities cither in the individual or in the organised mass. He became capable of moulding materials and other animals to his own- purpose. And that purpose he was ever expanding so as to envision higher and higher ideals, and then make for them. He could never have made or even thought of this progress had he hardened his social life into the rigid organisation of the bee or ant. Wherever he lost the other primary essential of advance, liberty, he became stagnant. Rigid division into classes or castes, as amongst the Hindoos, kept him at the stage of social life that the bee and the ant had attained. Freedom to move up or down was one of the first essentials of advance. A democracy should do everything in its power to keep in abeyance or obliterate class-conscious-ness. For it destroyed all chance of a truly united community. And the surest way to achieve it was education, provided the system gave free passage to talent through all its stages, and that was possible only through competition. Nature’s chief method of progress. EDUCATION ESSENTIAL. Continuing, the speaker declared that to ensure full scope to this, most educationists agreed that the best form to give competition in human societies was a well-organised, well-managed system of scholarships, which selected in each stage the talents that would most profit in the next stage. And the only wholesome system of scholarships was that based on examination. He could recall the system prevalent in the Scottish universities when he first entered them; it was one of patronage; most of the scholarships were the gift of noblemen or men high up in society, and they as a rule left it to their factors or agents, and a youth could get a scholarship only through backstairs influence. By the time he left to come out to New Zealand the process of transferring them from patronage to examination was well underway. The rebellion against patronage in parliamentary elections had begun in 1832 with the Reform Bill, and it had gone far to purify elections and raise them to a true democratic level. It was this process that made the change from patronage as the method of the scholarship system to examination inevitable. ’Had it not been for the deep root that • democracy had taken in the religion and schools of Scotland, class-consciousness, encouraged by this patronage system of granting scholarships, would have become rampant in its universities. A feeble shadow of it almost fell on American education in the accrediting system and threatened their own university a year or two ago. He hoped that that danger had finally vanished. Examination had its disadvantages and dangers; but it was the nearest they could come to impersonal decision and avoidance of that backstairs influence which was the chief source of corruption and “graft.” But examination must be made progressive, getting slightly stricter every year, or at least higher in stan-' dard;

NEED FOR THRIFT. “ These recurring periods of depression must be kept steadily in view,” said the chancellor. “We must never forget that in the prosperous times that precede arid follow them we must not spend all our revenue, but lay past against the evil day. Thrift, the maker of man, must never be abandoned in any period of .prosperty for those pernicious substitutes inflation and unproductive borrowing, substitutes that all governments, but especially Labour governments and colonial governments, have a strong tendency towards as the easiest way out of financial straits. The lesson that labour is getting drastically taught in the Homeland is soon forgotten as soon as the cloud of depression lifts. This quick oblivion of the necessity of foreseeing economy does not follow immediately after the war that has destroyed the capital and has caused depression. There is a pause before the younger generation that has known neither the difficult climb out-of the depths to prosperty, nor the destructive wastage of war, comes into power and the direction of affairs; and once they fall heir to the powers of the preceding generation they think that the universal talisman and panacea which they have seen rescuing their own and other countries out of the depths—borrowing — is as applicable to peace and recuperation as to the ravages of war. The bulk of them are still at the stage of life which is governed solely by the pursuit of pleasure, and they take their fill of it as they see their older comrades do who have returned from the war. The lesson of the war should have taught them they have not learned, and there is needed after the pause .a long period of bitter depression with its attendant evils of unemployment and distress to teach it to them. But by the time the next generation comes to the guidance of affairs, not only is this new tuition in thrift forgotten, but the horror of war and the disgust it engenders are swept out, and nothing less than a new war with its sequent depression is needed to inculcate the necessity of foresight and economy. UNIVERSITY SCHOLARSHIP FUND. “The first half century of our University was lucky in having as its treasurers men who realised this, and laid up against the evil day that was sure to come. Professor Shand, who fulfilled the duties of the office during most of the time, professor of mathematics in a Scotch community and an Aberdeen Scot. He kept his balance from fees and subsidy liquid, and the result was, as I pointed out last year, when we reached the great depression that was bound to follow the Great War and the Government was in such a fix financially that it had to look into every corner, especially into that of subsidies, to collect enough to balance its unbalanced budget. It thought not only about cutting down or abolishing our subsidy, but still more critically and enviously it looked at that liquid balance of £70,000, which Professor Shand and his successors had squeezed out of the fees and the subsidy, to be a scholarship fund in times, of need. It saw' at last that if it took away that balance it would have to re-, place it in the shape of scholarships. That lesson of thrift which helped us through several periods of depression I hope we shall not forgot, even though we have no longer that capable and forethinking Aberdonian to impress it upon us as he watches over our treasury.” INDUSTRIAL PROGRESS.

Referring to the existing depression. Professor Macmillan Brown said that the renewal of power was most needed after a' long period of defertilisation of resources, especially where those desonrees were pastoral or agricultural. Where they were industrial, a new machine or a modification of the old machines or a new power or new application of the former power might set an exhausted or outclassed industry on a new career of prosperity. Last century the application of the new steam power ultimately restored to Britain all the capital she had lost through supporting the Allies against Napoleon and lending them the funds wherewith they could continue the struggle to its victorious end, and all the markets that France had taken from 1191-. And now that she was again poverty-stricken through fighting, especially at sea, a long war, and'acting the purse-bearer for all the Allies, the electric, power discovered by her own scientist again, the world-

famed Faraday, was about to begin the restoration of her prosperity and power. Nor was she in as sorry a plight as she was in a century ago; then she had lost her colonies over the Atlantic; now she had an empire overseas such as the world had never seen before, as varied in its climates and undeveloped resources as our earth was capable of putting into the hands of one management. This empire she was about to organise and develop into a source of wealth and a market such as human history had never witnessed, and stretching into every sea and ocean on the globe. CONCERNING NEW ZEALAND.

“But we in New Zealand, at the edge of the world, seem,” he said, “ to be one of the least significant units in the organisation. But with our mountains and lakes we have water power to develop with which no other country in the world except Norway and Switzerland can compare. And at this juncture in the affairs of the world, our distance from other markets has been reduced to a negligible amount by the conquest of the air as well as of the sea. But our industrial age in its fullest development lies still in the future. Our immediate contribution to the greatness of this imperial organism that is about to function lies still in the pastoral and agricultural stage. And when the financial outlook begins to improve so far as to impress the ordinary pessimistic observer, there is no chance of such a boom in prosperity as follows the introduction of a new power or a new machine in the industrial world. If prices for our produce in the European markets do not go up to what they were before the war, we shall have l either to reduce the cost of raising them or increase the amount raised at much the same cost. And the only way to do this is to use fertilisers wisely, On that way our dairy farmers have entered especially in the North Island, and by the help of research at our two agricultural colleges, will learn to follow out more profitably without reducing the standard of living of the workers. CHEAPER FERTILISERS NEEDED. “ But there is one of our exports to which we have not yet learned to apply this method of making it more profitable, and that is wool,” said the chancellor. “ There is little or no attempt to make the pastures more fertile by liberal application of fertilisers. My visit to Easter Island impressed on me the seriousness of this mistake. The lessees of the island have used it for pastoral purposes, and, on the Chilean cadet training ship, the General Baquedano, on which I travelled to the island, we had a large consignment of the finest woolbearers from Victoria. Nor ■was this the first time by a long way that the owners of the flocks had made effort to improve their wool-bearing. Yet I found that this frequent introduction of new blood had produced no permanent improvement in the amount or quantity of the wool. It was only for a year or two that the introductions bore more than the usual three pounds of wool per sheep. As I wandered over the island I was struck with the poverty of its soil and of its grass, I called the attention of the lessees to this when I reached Chili, and suggested that the fertile mineral elements that were yearly exported from the island in hides and wool should somehow or other be replaced by a good application of fertilisers. But they treated this as the advice of a novice and considered it the wisest course to follow the practice of experienced Australian pastoralists and trust to the fertilisation by the animals that grazed on the pastures and produced the wool. It was undoubtedly a wise course to introduce new blood, but new mineral elements are as essential. FERTILISING YOUTHFUL TALENT.

“I have always had grave doubts about this passive treatment of our pastures,” he said, “especially when I have heard complaints not only of the quality of the woo] our sheep produce, but also of its quantity. And a year or two ago I gave the university £2OOO to establish a research scholarship or fellowship; after getting the Government subsidy of pound for pound, it should produce, a little over £2OO a year, and I hoped that it would bring out a competition amongst the ablest of the students at the agricultural colleges and so set on to research the best brains that our farming community could produce. I| also hoped that one of the problems that might engage the scholars and 1 fellows should be this: How to improve the wool crop by the improvement, not merely of the breed of sheep, but of the pastures. I was surprised to find that a nephew of mine. Dr Gordon Craig, who was one of the leading surgeons in Sydney, had the same purpose in view in buying a large station (Ulinda) far inland in New South Wales, to experiment on the improvement of Australian wool. Unfortunately he died of cardiac trouble this year, just when he was collecting an expert staff and starting experimentation. He has left the station to his widow, who is a graduate of the University of New Zealand, and she is entering with great enthusiasm into the project; she means to carry out all the research he meant to inaugurate and supervise, if he had lived. He realised that this, if anything, would help to draw Australia out of the depression in which, like all pastoral and farming communities, she is floundering.” FELLOWSHIPS NEEDED FOR RESEARCH.

The Coalition Government evidently realised that this was the only wholesome way out of financial difficulties when it subsidised fertilisers so as to induce farmers and pastoralists to be more liberal in their application. He hoped that they would see that there were still innumerable problems to solve in the two fundamental industries of the country, the pastoral and agricultural. If primary produce did not go back to its old price or near to it, the only alternative was to improve it both in quality and quantity. And this meant increasing research into the soils of the country and the elements in each that need strengthening. In other words, they must fertilise the brains of New Zealand and apply them thus fertilised to the countless problems that lay before them. Whatever they were economical in, and economical they must be if they were to survive this devastating financial blizzard, they must not be stingy in scholarships and fellowships; they must find out. by competition the finest minds in the rising generation and draw them' into research, preparing them for their task, not merely by improving the laboratories of the ■ sciences like biology, chemistry, and physics that were subsidiary to agriculture and pastoralism, but by developing the studies that helped to produce sharper and clearer thinking and expression. BENEFICIAL EFFECT OF DEPRESSION.

“ The misfortune is,” said the chancellor in conclusion,” that in these greater depressions like the post-Napoleome and that we have with us now, there are many subdepressions and sub-recoveries; and hopes are raised again and again that are again dashed to the ground. The good they do is first to reawaken and drive nearer to a fixed habit the love of thrift and second to bring about a movement towards invention and discovery and more efficient methods of work. The result of this is a great rise in both profit and wages and so in the standard of living. Men and women begin to be extravagant, thinking this rise in luxui’y has come to stay. Only a sihall proportion of them see that thrift is as essential as ever; the majority grow thriftless and are on the road to unemployment and financial depths as soon as the new machines and greater efficiency press production beyond the possibilities of consumption—i.e., as soon as one of the lesser periods of depression sets in. It is the duty of those who manage the Government to foresee this sequence and refrain from the usual panacea, borrowing; it is the duty of those who educate or guide education to impress upon the rising generation the necessity of thrift for the progress of the country and to lay up what they can save for the scholarships that will be needed. And it is one of the seeming anomalies of periods of depression that the number of students at the university colleges increases as also does the number of candidates for degrees. For prevalent unemployment turns the thoughts of thrifty and well-to-do parents of boys and girls leaving school without the chance of getting permanent employment or fixed career to university courses; for the most lamentable sequel of those periods is the proportion of the rising generation who fall into evil ways during their idleness and cannot give them up when the depression has passed. University fees tend to increase and it is the duty of the senate and of the governing boards of the colleges to see that this increase is not wasted or spent too lavishly, and that the surplus be stored up as a scholarship fund to attract and encourage the talents of the country into a career of fuller development. “One of the chief beneficial results ot such periods of depression is that they demand all the brainpower of the country to pilot it through them; and in the. past they have raised invention and organ-

isation to ■ a higher level; some of the machines that are the greatest- labour savers have been the product of such barren, hard-driven times. It is one of the functions of a university to set the talents of a country in this direction.” VOTE OF THANKS. At the conclusion of the address, it was decided on the motion of the pro-chan-cellor (Mr J. A. Haiiau, M.L.G.) that a vote of thanks be . accorded the chancellor, and that the resolution be recorded in the minutes of the meeting.