BRITAIN'S GIFTS TO THE WORLD.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 225, 22 September 1928, Page 8

BRITAIN'S GIFTS TO THE WORLD.

Mr. H. A. L, Fisher, formerly Minister of | Education, delivering the concluding lecture at the City of London Vacation Course in Education, recently took as his subject "England's Place in the World," and declared that: "This is a country which has spread through the world parliaments, railways and factories, co-operative societies and safely bicycles, the use of tobacco and afternoon tea, the practice of athletic sports and aseptic surgery, child welfare work, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, the jury system, the Salvation Army, high-class tailoring' and the Gilbert and Sullivan operas." "It is a country," he continued, 'favourably considered abroad for the plays of Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw, the poems of Milton and Byron, the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, and the fiction of Scott, Dickens, Kipling, Conan Doyle, Galsworthy and Wells. But perhaps the principal contribution of our island to the life of man upon this planet is that it has contrived to gather more than 450,000,000 human beings into a common polity, so that although differing from one another in every particular of colour, race, language and creed, they obey a common political superior and are schooled in peaceful methods for the settlement of their disputes. This great integrating achievement, whether the result of good fortune or skill, of high courage and deep humanity, of religious zeal or commercial appetite, or of all these in combination, gives to Britain a special place in the world. To Germany we cede a supremacy in beer, music and disciplined knowledge to France in taste, to the United btates m brilliant mechanical inventiveness."