THE WAIPA POST. Printed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. SATURDAY, 9th AUGUST, 1930. A CALL FOR BRAINS.

Waipa Post, Volume 41, Issue 3186, 9 August 1930, Page 4

THE WAIPA POST. Printed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. SATURDAY, 9th AUGUST, 1930. A CALL FOR BRAINS.

IT is related of a great painter that when asked by a young student with what he mixed his paints, replied: " With brains, sir." He meant by his gruff answer to teach that there is no short road to success. The knowledge of how to mix paints would not make a painter. If a man would excel, he must work; if he worked, he must work with intelligence; he must copy the head-line of his exercise and not his successive repetitions of that head-line, each worse than the last; even through the dullness of his own errors he must seek deliverance and light. Every successful man, if asked to what principally he attributed his success, would pay tribute to his brains. All the efforts made in New Zealand to educate the young are attempts to train the brain, or whatever serves the purpose, to discriminate between good and evil; to acquire and retain knowledge, and to apply that knowledge to the work that falls to the lot of each one in personal and corporate life. New Zealand is now turning out every year a great array of students, all of whom are entitled to the dignity of cap and gown. Is it as certain as it should be that all these young persons will use their brains, so that, while not despising the humbler walks of life, they may advance their own betterment and the corporate life of their country that has done so much for them ? There is a great library at Kenwood House, in London, encased in locked glass doors. It belongs to the people of London. The people who own it are fenced off from it. On free days they can pass along and gaze at the backs of the books. There is a great library, visible and apparently useless, and replete with all the knowledge of the ancients and moderns. We would not have our young New Zealanders like that library, stuffed with knowledge, but with that knowledge shut in like the Kenwood books, and visible only as backs through impassable doors. A young child, discovering for himself some secret of nature by observation and deduction, is nearer to the acquirement of brains than many who can claim to be overflowing reservoirs of facts.

Although we have deprecated the extreme pessimism that is shown in so many quarters because of the recent dislocation of our overseas markets, and, possibly, a good deal of public and private extravagance during many years of prosperity, we fully

recognise that the difficulties to be faced, here as elsewhere, are serious and call for the right use of all brains. Our representatives in Wellington, if their methods of expression are other than what we have been accustomed to in Parliament, are able men. They are quite capable of arriving at sound conclusions if they would for a time forget past battles, class cries, and preconceived ideas. Partisan shibboleths and class prejudices, in face of a national danger, must be scrapped. If a National Government is impossible, a pact is called for in which all sides could concentrate on the discovery of the best means of dealing with unemployment as it undoubtedly exists and sound insurance against its constant recurrence; the scrapping of unprofitable expenditure; the reduction of the cost of living; and how to meet, at least half way, the approaches of the leading statesmen of Great Britain to the dominions and the colonies for reciprocal economic agreements that will stop the insane practice iof the separate parts of an Empire seeking for special benefits at the cost of, and regardless of, the interests of each other. But the best that can be done in Wellington, and however much members may sacrifice personal and deeply engrained personal views to a sense of public duty, all will fall short of possible success unless the general tendency of the whole community towards over-expenditure in things that do not really matter, and which add but slightly to personal happiness, can be stayed. We plead for the application of brains as the true solvent of all our difficulties. Great hings might happen if legislative brains, now rather obscured by Reform, United, and Labour shibboleths—all, in truth, rather out of date —were pooled to meet what is little short of a national necessity.