Spirit of the Press.

Northland Age, Volume 6, Issue 34, 14 May 1937, Page 6

Spirit of the Press.

PEACE IN WESTERN EUROPE Peace in Europe and in Western Europe in particular, is an interest toward which undoubtedly also the Netherlands and Belgium have to contribute their share. But experience teaches that so long as the League of Nations does not function better, the best contribution will consist of the capacity of both to defend their own independence as powerfully as possible, and not to allow anybody to use them for partial interests. Along these lines Belgium and the Netherlands can best perform their European function, through being- a menace to nobody, a gateway for invasion against nobody, a wall which would resist to the utmost any invader who, through assault of the low countries, would menace a third party.— Algemeen Handelsblad (Amsterdam). AFTER THE BOOM, MORE BOOM ? We are still trying to reconcile the highly productive era of the twentieth century with the economic structure of the nineteenth. There is no proper reason why a period of depression should follow a boom. I know it is a fact that in the past we have ‘experienced dull periods after booms, and consequently w r e have come to accept the rotation as an inevitable trade cycle. It is not an inevitable cycle. There is no argument whatever against the fact that a depression is an entirely man-made state of affairs, which to a large extent is brought about by lack of national confidence, and by individual firms and governments playing safe against a supposedly inevitable slump. It is a situation created by our inability to handle efficiently the economics of modern life and to reconcile productive potentialities and demand with the desire and confidence to purchase. Let economists and financial experts put on their thinking caps and try to catch up with the engineer, and then, I am sure, slump periods, like plagues, will be things of the past. —Lord Austin, chairman of Austin Motor Company, Ltd., at Manchester, England. CHINESE TOLERANCE It is interesting to us Chinese, of course, to note the mentality of Westerners who industriously persist in

regarding cur rather ancient race as what may be described as “Gospel fodder” for the propagation of the peculiar religious beliefs held by this or that group of sectaries in England, the United States, and elsewhere. We Chinese believe, rightly or wrongly, that we are a tolerant people in this matter of religions in spite of the undeniable fact that our history during the past hundred years of the violent impact of Western civilization upon our own, is strewn with ail too numerous deplorable examples of outrages and murders of missionaries dwelling in our land. We do not attempt to condone tln se unhappy manifestations of hostility toward strangers who, according to their lights, are detemined to do good to us in spite of ourselves and what we may happen to think about the matter. But we often wonder what the reactions of the British peasantry, working classes, and upper classes would have been, if, during the past hundred years the villages, towns, and countryside of the United Kingdom had been occupied by a host of Chinese male and female religious zealots preaching and teaching strange doctrines to the inefigenous population of those places, that were utterly subversive and opposed to their own customs, traditions, and beliefs. If we Chinese had large organizations for shipping religious-struck young Chinese men and women to England to convey what we might call our “gospels,” as we considered, to the benighted inhabitants of that country, would we not be sowewhat presumptuous in our assumption that we were the repositories of Divine wisdom, and that somehow or other Providence had overlooked the people of England, and their reputed needs for eternal salvation ? But, as we have ventured to assert, being a tolerent people, the Chinese do nothing of the sort and are not the least concerned in the spiritual beliefs of others, which they do not consider to be in any way their business.—China Outlook, October 1936