THE BAND COLLEGIATE

Otago Witness, Issue 3513, 12 July 1921, Page 53

THE BAND COLLEGIATE

By

JESSIE MACKAY.

What is the most immediate and allembracing bond of reconcilement in a sick, divided, and murderous world? It is difficult to say. Somewhere in the deep springs of the spirit were religion is fed, there is a centre from which go out the lines of light and pity to far places. Certainly it is not in the churches that international strifes are stayed. The churches with noble exceptions, have uniformly been content, if not proud, to range themselves with narrow national interests, and leave unfathomed the mean, insidious, inner causes that work for war and aggrandisement- by force. If they had kept the watch towers, as the sentinels of Israel did against Phoenician and Philistine, is it possible that the peoples would have been betrayed into one red melee after another. The churches have followed where they should have led. It has been urged with a very fair showing of truth that art has been found the surest bond between nations at variance. In the ethereal art atmosphere, the meaner, more mercenary, jealousies die, and though the looting of art treasures and burning of libraries are the most wanton aggravations of war, it is not the artists and authors who loot or sanction looting. On the other hand, wars of liberation are fought out in a nation’s songs before ever they come toythe virdeal of steel. If a war has any warrant, look to the side where the poets are and there it will be found. iwery poet in Europe thrilled to the fall of the Bastille, though, as the shadow of the Terror grew, and as Napoleonism rose upon the ashes of mobhatred, the poets of Europe sang down the eagles of France, -even if it was but a hoary tyranny that faced the Corsican’s rough liberators. Byron ranged every generous European impulse on the side of Greece a century ago. To-day the fountains of Irish song overflow the world and rise in a rainbow spray of tears and divinest hope. There is a clamant' claim that labour will unite what Kingship, aristocracy, and plutocracy have divided. There is too much weight in this contention for it to be lightly tossed aside. It is over labour that tho juggernaut wheels of war drive hardest, and out of labour the war lords take their uttermost toll, however labour is cajoled with false trappings and fictitious prosperities, while the struggle is in progress. Labour is now learning all that. Still there is one weak link in the argument. Labour is not a human fixture like feminism, temperament or physical structure. A poet is always a poet, a scholar is always a scholar, a woman is always a woman, and a negro is always a negro, but a labourer may now end up as a lord or a Prime Minister, losing a tradition with every stop be rises. The fluctuation of circumstances must ever affect a condition primarily of circumstance, although the guiding hand of labour, moving to human ends, and braced by elementary needs, will always incline to constructiveness and peace. One would like to analyse the feelings of Tolstoy, could he know that his peasants finally saved Russia from the incubus of Bolshevism by calmly refusing to feed a country that would not pay them for growing food. There remains the bond of banded scholarship, the bond collegiate. And here, although finality can never be obtained in any such quest, there are singularly hopeful evidences of reconcilement. We know how militarism netted the German universities, and confess how often jingoism has penetrated our own, but with all this, the collegiate spirit at large, and especially in the great democratic universities of the West, is set- for peace and sympathetic understanding of international viewpoints. Take the growing influence of the Workers’ Educational Association, that valiant daughter of the Higher Scholarship, which in all British countries is spreading the seeds of thought, and forging labour the magic sword of knowledge. Ere even its present years are doubled we may look for results that will marie a milestone in international progress. “May?”—is that too strong and hopeful a word, considering how many bricks the British diplomatist is hurling down for every stone the British scholar-workman can raise in their place? Since the days of the pharaohs, it would seem, no men have been quite so busy building their own tombs as the diplomatists of Europe to-day. But knowledge is not so easily overthrown, and wisdom is not so easily blindfolded as the more material forces on which we build our capitals. And signs which are scarcely chronicled amid tlie

clanging events of State are often the essential preludes of a new world-order. The air of Europe is thick with thunderous Wk of reparation, and the emphatically non-scientifie p rocess of bleeding Germany white is out and away the primary object where the plain necessity of pulling Europe up on its feet again should -engross the mind of state craft if Europe is to count again in the counsels of mankind. But we learn with pleasure that conservative Oxford goes fresh from chivalrous capitulation to British women to break the intellectual blockade of the Central Powers. Oxford holds out the hand to German scholarship once more-—a concession which will touch starving Germany as it would touch few other nations in like case, bridging the 50 years of the evil spell of Bismarck with the memory of German philosophy kind and undefiled. While at this very moment our Home diplomacy has apparently taken, with a fanfare of trumpets, the turning towards the complete alienation of America and all that that portends, one great soul in the East is fighting a lone Aryan fight for the solidarity of civilisation. Rabindranath Tagore has just laid the foundations of an International University in that beautiful spot in Northern Bengal where so long his school for boys has been a beacon for India. At that school neither castle nor creed marred the perfect atmosphere of illumination and lov-e in which these boys were instructed. At the International College, already promised its full limit of European students, there will bo no ; distinction made between men and women, j both will be provided for on the same open i simple lines. Those who best know the 1 significance of Rabindranath Tagore’s ! pilgrimage through Europe and America before the war will best appraise this vista of peaceful unbuilding now that his prophecies have been so verified. Lastly wo have the robust agencies of the Christian Stud-ent Movement started by Dr J. R. Mott, and embracing so vast a. field of religious and intellectual fellowship. Taking its little organ “The Intercollegian,” as the standard of its activities, one is comforted to know that Christian internationalism has a body and a being, littl-e as we might think it." One fiqds there truth—breezy, open-minded truth, none too sugar-coated. There are forces working for our earthly I salvation which the madness of the chan- 1 celleri-es cannot overthrow, «>'and among them may be hopefully rated the higher ! intercollegiate spirit, finding union in truth.

CUSTOMS DUTIES. STATEMENT BY THE MINISTER. WELLINGTON, July 6. The Minister of Customs was interviewed to-day regarding the big jump in Customs revenue from £4,830,321 in 1919-20 to £3,408,726 for the past financial year. It was stated that a considerable increase in Customs, revenue had been looked for. the estimate for the year being six millions, approximately an increase of £1,200,000, but, this estimate was far exceeded. lie pointed out, however, that this was not due to any increase in the rates of duty tv tho Government. There had been no such in- | crease. The big jump was due in large part j to the unexpectedly great increase in im- ! ports, Home manufacturers filling accumulated orders far sooner than it was thought possible; also partly due to the effect of the old ad valorem rates on the greatly enhanced values of imports. lie could not say offhand how much was due to each of these causes, but the effect of the ad valorem duties was allowed for in the estimate. Thus the greater part of the increase was probably due to the bigger j volume of imports. The Minister added j that the report of the Tariff Commission was not jot to hand. The deliberations j were not yet completed. Such a report was always first submitted to Cabinet and Parliament, and was never - allowed to become public until the Tariff Bill was introduced.