TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 120, Issue 19991, 15 September 1936, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Need for Poets “Great poets are scarce—scarcer, perhaps, than scientific men,” observed Mr Stanley Baldwin at the Empire Universities Conference. “ I always feel that one of the tragedies of the world is the way in which the devil is using the discoveries of the chemist, and of those men who invented the internal combustion engine, for the destruction of mankind. No poet has done that. I do not think many of them did much harm in their lives, but they left us incalculable benefits for this world, and if the universities can conspire to produce more poets, more power to their elbow!” “Mr Baldwin’s statement at the Congress of the Universities of the British Empire, that the world needs more poets to inspire it with a sense of unity and a sense of freedom will be simply meaningless to honest Philistines and suspiciously matter-of-fact to aesthetes.” states the Scotsman. “Yet poetry does indirectly contribute to tho realisation of human unity and the value of freedom. It is at once the fine flower of Ihe imagination and the chief stimulant of the imagination. And without the exercise of the imagination one can with difficulty, if at all, apprehend the truth. It needs an effort of the imagination to realise ihe essential duty of humanity that transcends race or nation or class, and without spiritual, intellectual, and political freedom full imaginative activily is impossible. The Pence Treaty

“Let us admit the truth ... It was not Wilson who failed; the position is much more serious. ... It was the statesmen that failed as much as the spirit of the peoples behind them. . . . Knowing the Peace Conference as 1 know it from within, I feel convinced in my own mind that not the greatest man born of woman in the history of the race could have saved the situation. . . . Sincerely as wc believed in the moral ideals for which we had fought, the temptation at Paris of a large booty to be divided proved too great. In the end not only the leaders but the people preferred a bit of booty here, a strategic frontier there, a coalfield or an oilwell, an addition to their population, or their resources to all the faint allurements of the ideal." —General Smut^-