ENGLISH SPEAKING UNION

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19365, 23 July 1925, Page 7

ENGLISH SPEAKING UNION

SPEECH BY” SIR G. BUCHANAN. BOND OF COMMON COURTESY. The guests of honour at the monthly reception given by the hospitality committee of the English Speaking Union I Melbourne) recently, were the wife of the Administrator of New Guinea (Airs E. A. Wisdom), Sir George Buchanan, Air Babbit (American Commissioner for Ti ide and Commerce), and Air Herman LeA-y, a former Ballarat Rhodes scholar and pros 1 dent of the British American Club ’.n Oxford.

Speaking on the creed of the union, Sir George Buchanan said that it had been remarked that the “last thing a democracy wished to hear was an opinion contrary to its own.’’ He had travelled in every part of the Englishspeaking world except Now Zealand, and had met many charming people and made many friends; but it must be remembered that the task on which the English Speaking Union had set out was a very difficult one, for although the English-speaking nations all spoke the same language, their national ideas might be widely divergent, and this aspect of the position was given prominence in a recent article in the National Review, entitled “The Anglo-American Myth.’’ There was much to be overcome if the AngloAmerican union was to prvoe a reality, but, at the same time, its future could be helped on by the friendship promoted by the English Speaking Union. Nover, continued Sir George, was there a time when the creed of the union, with its aims of sympathetic understanding within the Empire and between the Empire and America, was more necessary than to-day, when aft parts of the Empire were learning to speak the English tongue. In India there was a great opening for the union’s influence, the English ‘lawn tennis, cricket, and football, an 4 the English language was the only speech in Indian universities and in Indian social and business circles. Whatever the underlying differences between East and West, there was one common bond —their joint appreciation of common courtesy. This courtesy was not sufficiently inculcated in the youth of the world to-day, and much of the ill-feeling which arose from time to time in Indian circles came from the mere ignorant rudeness of members of our own race. A type, of such illjudged discourtesy was shown recently in a ruling Indian prince imbued with all English ideas, who was travelling privately by train to his dominions, and whd entered a first-class carriage with an Englishman. The Englishman remarked aloofly, “I don’t want to travel with natives,’’ and the prince thereupon left the carriage, to discover subsequently that the Englishman was in India on a visit to the prince himself. _____