THE SOLUTION OF POVERTY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3827, 4 August 1928, Page 3

THE SOLUTION OF POVERTY.

“There is a faint hope, remote and vague at present, that by research and the patient addition to knowledge (in which the universities will play an important part) poverty may eventually be eliminated from civilised countries,” said Sir Theodore Morrison, principal of Armstrong College, Newcastle, in an address recently. “I have not the folly to suppose that these momentous changes can be brought about in the lifetime of anyone here present. The improvement of society as a whole is a slow process. Nowhere can be learned better than in a university the futility of violent revolution. . . . It is

the dream of some members of the university that the problem of poverty may be made to yield to patient investigation and analysis; that if we understood its causes poverty might be reduced and eventually eliminated from human life altogether. It is, I think, this faraway hope that is sending so many of the best minds of the young generation to the study of economies. Alfred Marshall, the economist, a man typical to his finger-tips of the best that Cambridge can produce, consistently held the view that the elimination of poverty was the first requisite of human progress. Talking of the success which he helped to attain in the solution of the problems of economies, he said: — ‘Representing the question by a length of a thousand miles, the progress I hope to make toward it may be four or five inches. If I make that progress I shall be well contended with my life —if I mako it possible for the next man to start four or five inches nearer the goal than I have.’ This is an austere conception, but it is the essence of university teaching. Great successes are not won cheaply; but unselfish hard work and single-hearted devotion to the search for truth may. make this a better world for our children’s children.”