THE NEED FOR DISCIPLINE

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22518, 28 September 1938, Page 7

THE NEED FOR DISCIPLINE

A PREVENTIVE OF

WAR ADDRESS by professor SHELLEY Fn.ni FOR INTERNATIONAL I \ DURST AN DIN (1 That to wait until war threatened before taking steps to prevent it. was to wail too long was an opinion expressed by Professor J. Shelley in an address yesterday in the Canterbury College Hall before he unveiled a memorial window to those from the college who served in the Great War. War could not be prevented by international machinery only, he said, but by international understanding, which came from the recognition of the universality of common human feelings and aspirations —by tolerance based on humanised knowledge. All true scholars were the servants of peace. When war threatened before steps were taken to prevent it, the forces behind those who met in conference were already arrainged against one another —those forces that bad silently developed in the minds and hearts of citizens throughout the years and suddenly become polarised. Politics must follow the lead of medicine, and concern itself not only with remedial measures, but with preventive measures also. It should concern itself not only with patching up the abnormal but with assiduously providing for the growth of the normal. It should be remembered that peace had i Indiscipline no less than war, even more so, for it was that lack of constant and watchful and difficult discipline for peace that precipitated people into war. When he. spoke of discipline in peace, he meant the social and intellectual . discipline which should keep watch on the growing aspirations of men and provide disciplined means of expression for them. This discipline was such as would provide informed and tolerant minds for the reception of new ideas. In other words, it was such discipline as was the very reason of existence of Canterbury College.

“War an Escape”

“The simple issue of war provides an escape for the inadequate mind of man from the multiplicity of issues of peace.” said Professor Shelley. “It is easy to make war; it is difficult to

make a living peace, as all students of the Treaty of Versailles know. It is just this simplicity of the issue in war that makes it so dangerously attractive and so attractively dangerous. It demands the most exquisite discipline and patience to find adventure in the stuffy, half-blind, confused groping in meetings, conferences, and committees seeking some aim only dimly descried. Few of us arc capable of such discipline, and we seek relief * from the sense of cur inadequacy by pretending that some definite material group of human beings is the afeh-tenemy of everything we. seek.?’ s .I- : I '•The enmities -Of the' Great War and the attempts’to fix. war guilt.had been almost forgotten; arid that was just as welL For who. could say in what secret places, in what unconscious ways, were moving the thought-germs of another war? The poor puppets whose names blazed theatrically on the pages' of history were often little more than noisy materialisations • of vague thoughts and habits of mind that had been growing silently for generations. And no one could say, when war came, that he was innocent of causing it. One could not separate oneself from the community or from the age. The Great Need “Let us to-day set aside the bitternesses and doubtful blames that followed the Great War, and remember only the glory of those who, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, ‘willingly and wittingly left the purpose of their lives unachieved in order that all-life should not be wrenched from its purpose: and ;without fear ... turned from these ; gates of learning to those of the grave’ “I have spoken mostly of discipline, because I feel that is the word which would be spoken •by the-men whom we remember to-day- could they return to us.‘ Informed self-discipline, they wbuld; say, is our great need today— that is not only consistent with; but absolutely necessary to, the happy existence of a free and democratic people. “Believing that the memory ot that glorious band of past students, men and women, who sacrificed life and the anticipation of life that the ideals of humanity embodied in the British peoples migfit prevail, believing that that memory- will inspire 'down :hc years the students of this college to wage war against ignorance and human estrangement, in all humility, and in the name of those who would do homage to that memory, I now unveil this memorial window.”