The Christchurch Star PUBLISHED BY New Zealand Newspapers Ltd. TUESDAY, JANUARY 22, 1935. NARROWING SEAS.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20519, 22 January 1935, Page 6

The Christchurch Star PUBLISHED BY New Zealand Newspapers Ltd. TUESDAY, JANUARY 22, 1935. NARROWING SEAS.

TT IS ONE of the prosaic facts of life in southern seas that our welcomes and farewells are outgrowing some of the rapture, and also of the sadness, of Tennyson’s, Fresh &s the first beam glittering on a sail That brings our friends up from the underworld; Sad as the last which reddens over one That sinks with all we love below the verge. We look a little wistfully after the Duke of Gloucester, indeed, because he is not free to come and go with the frequency, say, of an international tennis star. The settled habits of the landsman, confirmed hitherto by the grim economic fact that a trip Home, at best, is an event of a lifetime, are being shaken by the realities of fast sea .travel. We have added Jamaica and Pitcairn Island to the stopping places of vessels that link us with the Old World, and the Spanish Main is traversed now by treasure ships from a New World of flocks and herds and happy homes. It is an age of easy sea travel that makes the free colonial life more enviable than ever, and we in this country arc not insensible to the great advantages of our position. PERSONAL LINKS. YET IN SPITE of the continuous movement to and from these islands, the majority of the inhabitants are anchored in their homes. Even those that travel for a time are drawn back by the chain of affection. So it is with the Duke. He is going Home. But lie takes with him the treasures of memory, and the knowledge that is now becoming increasingly available to those who ligve the task of serving the Empire. The Duke of Gloucester moved during this formal visit in the fierce light of his princely office, but when the Duke of Kent goes quietly to the West Indies for bis honeymoon be must realise how the increased facilities of travel have widened the scope of even a prince’s roaming. And politicians and statesmen from the Old Counti'y come and go with a frequency that we in New Zealand would never have reckoned on a couple of tiecades ago. The visits of men like Mr Malcolm MacDonald and Sir Maurice Hankey naturally put us under closer scrutiny, as they also draw us nearer in time and in knowledge to the heart of the Empire. And it is not 100 much to hope that just as the Prince of Wales slips across to the Continent for a few weeks, or the Duke of Kent sails for the Caribbean Sea without pomp and circumstance, this visit of the Duke of Gloucester may be the forerunner of other and less formal exchanges of goodwill. EARLY AMBITIONS. TNII HIGHT tells us that Clirist- " church possesses a medical school, or rather an endowment for such a school, and his reminder recalls a few pages of early provincial history. The general hospital was placed in its present unsuitable site as a medical school, of which one of the fellows of the adjacent college, being a medical man, was to have the superintendence. Incidentally, only five acres were granted, and the huge acreage that the hospital now occupies lias been taken, ver\ T irregularly, from park reserves without the excuse of the proximity of a college and its medical stall'. It is probable that the self-reliance of the pioneers would have borne fruit in the establishment of an adequate medical school but for the abolition of provincial government, for we read in an early editorial on the very subject of hospitals and charitable aid:— The blighting shade of centralism has crept over our local institutions. Local self-government, once a reality, now lives under Ministerial tutelage and on eleemosynary aid from headquarters. A great multitude of impotent local bodies patiently wait round the Bethesda of Parliament till a Treasury Angel*, goes down into the pool and troubles the waters. It is impossible not to feel a pang of regret occasionally that the pioneers did not realise their vision of a medical school in Canterbury, although one i bound to add that in the matter of the skill of its surgeons and medical men the province has taken a foremost place in the Dominion.