THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 217, 9 June 1943, Page 4

THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

Comments —Reflections

Truth fears nothing except being hidden. —Proverb.

“I would like to paraphrase the famous saying of Lincoln about a nation not being able to exist half-free and half-slave by saying that a nation cannot exist with half its people rich and half its people destitute. The civilized world cannot exist with half the nations healthy and prosperous and half poverty-ridden and diseased.’’— Mr. I’ethick-LHwrence, M.P. in the House of Commons.

“A group of shabby Japanese, arms raised in surrender, walked toward the American lines (on Guadalcanal). This was no group of raw recruits shaken by their first experience under fire. These men were members of the Japanese 224th Infantry Regiment, a crack outfit which was cited by Emperor Hirohito for its work in the Malayan campaign. They had been defeated by words as well as bullets. The Americans know a few tricks of psychological warfare, and for several days loudspeakers had been blaring up at the front, calling on the hungry, tired Japanese to surrender. American planes had been flying back and forth across the Japanese Hues, dropping leaflets printed in Japanese advising the enemy troops to give up or face death by steel or starvation.”—U.S. United Press correspondent with the forces.

‘‘There is at the present time a vociferous enthusiasm for what is called progressive education, than which, in its extreme forms, nothing could be more reactionary or more damaging to youth. By progressive education appears to be meant the turning loose of youth in the world in which they live to express themselves, as the saying is, and to form such habits and tastes as they from time to itme inay choose or which appear to be natural to them. This has been properly described as the rabbit system of education. The rabbit is at liberty to run about the garden where his life is passed and feed upon such plants, weeds, and flowers as may attract him and occupy himself as seems inviting from moment to moment. To call any such process education is in the highest degree absurd.”— Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, U.S.A.

“I suggest that our watchword after the war should be ‘Expansion’ rather than ‘Restriction.’ We were cursed by restriction schemes, in the period between the two wars, it must be expansion hut not inflation; stability of prices, but not stagnation,. order in our schemes, but not undue rigidity. Just making tho best of all we have and throwing everything in, whether it is human or whether it Is material wealth that we cast into the furnace of the common interest, so I believe that If we can go on doing that in the less dramatic 'days of peace we shall succeed as we did not succeed last time, in winning the peace after we have won the war. In peace as in war we shall need high courage, firm determination, mucli resourcefulness, and plenty of hard work in order to overcome formidable difficulties, which should not be underestimated, and to make the most of the great opportunities which will open out before us.”—Mr. Dalton, President of the British Board of Trade.

“It was never a pilot who started the idea that night falls. A pilot knows that it does not. It oozes up out of the ground, fills the hollows and low places with purple pools of shadow that spread and rise to the tops of the trees and the houses. Long before the sky lias darkened the world below is swimming in night. And then finally darkness begins washing up over the sky from the east, climbing over the zenith, closing down at last over the final gleams of the sunset. Here and thenstars begin to prick through, larger and more liquid than ever seen from the ground, and the moon, big and white, outlines the eifrtli. Below the plane lights map the towns, race along the roads, accenting but not relieving the blackness, for darkness clings to the ground. Whatever light there is clings to the sky to the last.”—From “Adventure Was the Compass.”

“When we now say. ‘Give us liberty or give us death,’ we mean, Give us not only freedom for a man to achieve his individual destiny but freedom to work toward a world in which all men, having life, shall have also as an iijalienablg right the opportunity to make life fruitful, to receive their just reward for their labour, to live in security in a productive, ordered world. The Bishops of Norway, steadfastly refusing to yield one jot of their rights as dignitaries of their Church and shepherds of their people; the educators of China, teaching fifty thousand students in six score universities that refuse to close their doors in spite of impoverishment and constant 'danger; these are among the living proofs that intellectual freedom is the basis of our common culture. Holding to it, under all their manifold differences of expression, the democracies are united. Intellectual freedom has truth as its goal. Understanding among peoples must have truth as its basis. Wisdom long since enshrined both verities in a phrase that acquires fresh point in this crisis of our time. The Truth shall make you free.”—Mr. Charles A. Thomson, Chief of the Division of Cultural Relations, U.S. Department of State, in an address delivered before the Institute on 'World Organization, Washington, D.C. *• • ' A Mother’s Prayer. [A reader inquires for the authorship of the following lines. Can anyone supply it?] ’ As thou didst walk the laud of Galilee, So, loving Saviour, walk with him for me, For, since the years have passed and he is grown, I cannot follow, he must walk alone. Be Thou my feet, that I have had to stay, For Thou canst comrade him on every way. Be Thou my voice when sinful things allure, Pleading with him to choose those that indure. Be Thou my hand that would keep his in mine, All, all things else that mothers must resign. When he was little I could walk and guide, But now, I pray, that Thou be at his side. And as the Blessed Mother folded Thee, So, loving Saviour, guard my son for me.