TOPICS OF THE TIMES

Southland Times, Issue 25342, 22 July 1935, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE TIMES

Collective Farming. Soviet agricultural experts predict that Russia this year will gather the largest harvest in its history (says The Observer’s correspondent in Moscow). The strietjy Socialistic type of organization in the collective farms, in which professions and members were pooled and each paid according to his needs has been condemned and abandoned, for the time being at any rate. Payments on the basis of piece-work and awards of premiums to those who excel in production have replaced the former system, and already is yielding superior results. Membership in a collective furthermore no longer restricts an individual from owning plots of land for private cultivation. Such plots vary according to location from threequarters of an acre to about three acres; each peasant household in the grain

areas maintaining membership in a collective farm is now encouraged by the Government to acquire a cow and raise calves, sheep, pigs, and unlimited poultry and rabbits. It is these incentives which make for the better combination of peasants’ personal interests with the general interests of the collective which is resulting in increased productivity. These changes, introduced recently, are an important concession to the socialized portion of the peasantry, which now constitutes close on 90 per cent, of Russia’s twenty million peasant households, and bid fair to bring about an increase of 16 per cent, in the agricultural output which the Government seeks to achieve this year. The India Bill.

One simple truth has become more apparent the more the Indian question has been examined. Some new plan for India’s government had to be found, says the Daily Telegraph. Every commission and every committee that has studied the position has reported that the existing form of administration is no longer suitable. Every scheme proposed, other than that of the present Bill, has failed ‘to find acceptance from any considerable party in this country. The Commons were asked to reject the Bill for what Mr Cadogan rightly described as “two sets of reasons completely contradictory of one another.’’ Again the existence of a single “No” lobby brought the Socialists, who would go far beyond the Bill, and the followers of Mr Churchill, who think its proposals too revolutionary, into an uneasy alliance. The middle course, which the Bill represents, triumphed. Even that middle course is an “enormous incalculable experiment,” as was said by Mr Isaac Foot, one of its strong supporters. Great Britain has ade in its history many such incalculable experiments, and has seen them succeed. This is the greatest of them all. but it inspires more hope than misgiving. Making Artificial Radium.

The Soviet Union now has the most powerful apparatus in the world for bombarding the atom, reports the Moscow correspondent of the London Observer. The apparatus, intended ‘o solve the problem of creating artificial radium, which is of incalculable importance to medicine, has been assembled in the laboratory of Professor Mysotski in the Leningrad Radium Institute, and will soon be put into operation. Capable of producing a stream of ions at a tension of from 15 to 18 million volts, the Soviet atom-splitting machine is seven times as powerful as its most powerful counterpart in the West. The world’s largest magnet, made of thirty-five tons of high duality soft iron, is an important contributing factor to the enormous power of Professor Mysotski’s apparatus. This monster magnet has a force of attraction of 150 tons, sufficient to pull several loaded freight cars. A significant feature of the Leningrad machine is the relatively low potential required in its primary circuit—3o,ooo volts, as compared with hundreds of thousands of volts employed in previous devices of this type. This improvement has made it possible greatly to decrease its size and increase its efficiency. Impelled by the world scarcity of radium, indispensable to medicine, scientists have long struggled with the problem of making ordinary substances radio-active through prolonged bombardment by particles possessing a high notential. The activizing of ordinary table salt by a seventeen-hour bombardment at a tension of three million volts was achieved by the noted American scientists, Laurence and Livingston. The Soviet apparatus, with its 15 to 18 million volt capacity, will make possible the communication of radioactivity to substances for a much longer period, thereby providing the medical world with a less costly and immeasurably increased supply of artificial radium.