OTHER PEOPLE’S VIEWS

Hokitika Guardian, 9 January 1925, Page 3

OTHER PEOPLE’S VIEWS

STATIONARY CIVILISATION. ■■ Of all the land civilisations only two survive 1 ndia and 1 hina. Me are often warned of what dreadful things may happen when these countries ‘awaken’ and Hood the world with their millions. But this is to picture all peoples as restless, and as quarrelsome, as ourselves. It may be doubted whether the racial tendencies cultivated by so many centuries of stationary life van he quickly overcome and altered. In all the centuries of her power Egypt never expanded further than Syria; the powers of .Mesopotamia only reached at furthest stretch to the shore ot the Mediterranean before they Jell; India has been the helpless victim of one invader after another. The expansion which means life to our sea race seems dangerous to those otherwise stable land empires. They can only held together so long as they ,hiig to their river valleys, tor the (liiiivulties of communication over the intervening mountain ridges P lO ' int permanent expansion.— liamsay 1 raqusir. Professor of Architecture at McGill University. Montreal.

AUSTRIA TO-DAY. When one visits Austria one perceives that the true Utopian is believer in oligarchies. For they may far more justly he described as pleasant in themselves, but unable to endure the stresses and strains of leaiitv. Many types of mind aie tai happier in this sort ot community than thev over could be under a democraev: the unimaginative man who was a Civil Servant or Army officer in pre-war Austria must have known the contentment of a well-attended child in its nursery. But the concussion of international disaster ends all that. For if one knocks down a wall theie is nothing left but scattered bricks hut if a structure consisting of living units is subjected to the same force its dispersed units will reassemble and find some new way of cohering again into a communal Kwh. The . process has happened m more high, democratised Germany. But m Aitsi • cops at the moment, only SIfST iSs, but such beaut if uh sun-mellowed, mossgrown bricks t at one cannot help preferring the spectacle to that of Germany.—Rebecca West,