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Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIX, Issue 21867, 21 January 1941, Page 4

It is not news that an Italian Futurist poet, Major Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, defended “the aesthetics and beauty of war” in an address delivered recently before a Boman audience, states the New York Times. It is news, dnd good news, that a part of the audience audibly signified before the lecture was over that enough was enough. Such an incident could hardly occur in Berlin, where war is taken seriously as Hitler’s great gift to mankind. In Italy there seems to be some survival of the sense of irony. The sense of irony may reveal to many Italians that Mussolini’s warlike activities since last June, however beautiful in conception, have brought small rewards to his country. They had little enough to eat in May; they have less now. They had lost sons, brothers and husbands in the Ethiopian and Spanish adventures; they are losing more now in Greece and Egypt. They have helped to bomb Britain, but many of their aeroplanes did not return. Coffee, butter, peace and honour have been bartered for glory, and there isn’t as yet any glory.

“At the end everything comes back to the effort of the individual,” said Viscount Samuel in an address to chemists at the Boyal Institution. “We may talk of the State, universities, societies, industries—but these are mere names. They are nothing but the terms we use for the groupings of individual men and women who co-operate for various purposes. If the individuals are capable, the work is good; if they are incapable, it fails. If our nation had remained illiterate, it would have had no scientific industries; if its general standard of education were now higher than it is, the industries would be more efficient than they are. Among the individuals it is the originator, the genius, who counts the most. It has been said that ‘Genius is a zig-zag streak of lightning in the brain.’ There must come first the sudden idea—vivid, dynamic. Only after that there is need for that ‘infinite capacity for taking pains,’ of which we have always heard; there must be sound knowledge, laboriously acquired, which can put to effective purpose the vivifying idea.”

Now that the lights have gone out in' Europe, writes David Thomson, it is more than ever important to remember that the future is always the result not of the immediate past, but of the whole of the past. The decisive factor in the whole of the past and the present is not the spectacular and expensive exploits of ramshackle dictatorships, but the permanent desire of ordinary men and women in all parts of the world for security against violence and injustice. That, as we have seen, is the eternal human aspiration on which the democratic ideal is based. .