THE MAN-POWER MAN.

Colonist, Volume LX, Issue 14622, 29 January 1918, Page 2

THE MAN-POWER MAN.

AN ANATOMIST OF FACTS.

Sir Auckland Geddes (says the "Daily Mail") is one of the new men the war has produced. Three years ago he was Professor of Anatomy at M'Gill University, Montreal, Canada, with a reputation as a scientific investi gator of problems in anthropology arid biology. Behind this was a. history of student days at Edinburgh—where he played Rugby for his university and maintained the Geddes tradition for

brains and courage—war services in South Africa and ihen again surgery and research. He is a man who will never be taken for anyone but himself —clean-shaven, high-domed forehead, large, long square jaw ; wido firm mouth, deep-set, humorous, kindly eyes; a tall man with a capacious handshake. He looked a unique and commanding, personality in khaki, and has lost no part of his "presence" by putting on a well-cut civilian suit again.

i As Director of Recruiting, General. j Geddes was better known to the inner < circle of the Cabinet and War Council i, than to the public. Those who put him there to straighten out the muddle caused by our rapidly changing system of raising men for the army knew his . capacity for clear thinking and calm ] reasoning, and his courage. Such: qualities were needed. Tc-day as Minister oF National Service and M.P. he is becoming known as a man of large, broad ideas —one who talks facts andj faces them.-

Thci/C is more than a hint of the professor 'of anatomy in his speeches. As a professor of that exact science— healed the chair of Anatomy at Dublin as well.as at Montreal —he has been accustomed tc talk and illustrate, facts to two or three hundred critical young

men at a time; and to ask them to. draw deductions from those facts. Hence his ability to explain the process

whereby the affairs of men and nations get into a tangle, and the obvious steps which must be taken to unravel them. He,has studied cause and effect in the mSst delicately balanced and wonderful machine in the world, the human body. With the calm logic of the East, where his father lived and worked., he can say, "What is, has been; what has been, will be." I In his, deal ings with other men he can be courteous to all and firm withal.

He has no illusions. To him the-war appeals as a many-sided problem in;volving not merely the surface xacts of life and death, victory and defeat, but also the vaster, broader issues of the , birth of new empires, the death of old 'civilisations, the creation of,new. Ho |is not brind to the sordid side of lru,man nature or the subtler forms of danger which beset a nation at war. His appeal t;> his recruiting staff to be- ! ware of corruption wa;; a word

from a man who lias known what it is to be assailed by many temptations and has resisted them.

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