Notes

New Zealand Tablet, 28 September 1916, Page 34

Notes

Education Finance We direct our readers’ attention to the statement appearing on page 26 of this issue, showing the cost of education in New Zealand for the year ended March 31, 1916. The Catholics of New Zealand owe a debt to the Catholic Federation, and especially to Mr. W. F. Johnson (secretary of the Wellington Diocesan Council) for having extracted these figures from the annual report of the Minister of Education, and for the accurate and concise way they have been presented. These figures may now be taken as official. The analysis of the figures, with additional information, as given by Father Coffey in St. Joseph’s Cathedral on last Sunday (p. 27) will repay perusal. German Suffragist Message The women of Germany, at least, are sound on the war question. _ Zeitschrift fur Frauenstinnrecht, the German woman suffrage organ, has sent this message to the women of France (says the Herald) :— * We feel, think, and suffer like you, and swear that after this catastrophic war the women of all nations shall work unitedly to prevent for ever its recurrence.’ The Tunnel is Coming The tunnel which is coming is the tunnel beneath the English Channelthe long-talked-of tunnel between England and France. M. Sartiaux, the well-known chief engineer of - the Nord Railway Company, speaking the other day at his office at the Gare du Nord to the

Weekly Dispatch, said:—‘So far as France is concerned, everything is ready. The Bill is passed and the money will not be difficult to find. All we are waiting for is England’s decision to join hands with us and help us to make the tunnel in common. The tunnel will cost .£16,000,000, half of which would be borne by England and half by France, and each country would bore one half of the tunnel. Well, Britain is spending just now £6,000,000 per day and France £4,000,000, so that two day’s war-time expenditure of both countries would more than cover the cost of making the tunnel. It is proposed to make two tunnels, one for traffic from England to France, another for traffic from France to England.’ - ; Bernard Shaw on British Blunders Mr. 11. G. Wells has just published a new volume entitled What is Coming I —being an attempt to give a systematised and reasoned forecast of the probable lines of development of the present struggle. The book has been reviewed in the Nation by Mr. Bernard Shaw, who, in the course of some handsome compliments to Mr. Wells, indulges in some cutting sarcasm at the expense of the English Coalition Cabinet. ‘ I am silenced by a doubt as to whether Mr. Wells has a high reputation,’ says Mr. Shaw. ‘ I do not often see a review of his prophetic works which shows anything like an adequate sense of his extraordinary powers; and I sometimes see reviews that are not even commonly generous. For our politicians, whom his books most immediately concern, they do not seem to exist: hardly a Minister opens his mouth without betraying an abysmal ignorance not only of Mr. Wells’s prophecies, but of the popular text-books which he must have mastered before he was ten years old, if indeed he was not born with the knowledge they impart to duller men, just as he was born with a knowledge of the nutritive value of milk. It is safe to guess that Mr. Wells read Macaulay’s Essays before he was sixteen : it is extremely doubtful whether any . member of the Cabinet has yet got so far as Little Arthur’s History of England. * ‘ Mr. Wells’s conclusions represent the integration and ratiocination of a mass of historical and scientific facts, much of it necessarily the common inheritance of all thoughtful educated men, which, if it has ever been planted in the heads of our party leaders, has either' been sterilised by the aridity or excessive sentimental moisture of the soil, or after some faint sprouting has withered and perished; for neither in our official counsels as to war economy nor our attempts at emergency legislation does Parliament think or act in the least as Mr. Wells thinks or would have it act, or indeed at all otherwise than as a very average guild of tinkers might be expected to set about saving the country. There is hardly a problem that has not been worked out and solved for Parliament by persons of the general type of Mr. Wells, if not of his individual genius but it invariably proceeds as if eveVy member were Adam the day after his expulsion from Paradise. And thus, however much genius England produces, she never gets any further than she can fight. The pilots who weather the storm never look at the stars and have never heard of the mariner’s compass. In- . fatuated with the skill with which they can handle the little fleet of party canoes in Election Dock, they tackle the ocean with a great contempt for faddists parteilos Gesellen), and, like the Irish pilot, cry, “T know every rock on this coast [crash] —and that’s one of them,” ’