OXFORD & PARIS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 December 1942, Page 3

OXFORD & PARIS

UNIVERSITIES WITH TIES THROUGH CENTURIES RENEWED AND EXTENDED IN STRESS OF WAR. WORK FOR FUTURE UNDERSTANDING. The universities of Oxford and Paris have had many ties through the long centuries since Europe emerged from the Dark Ages, and have constantly had an influence on one another. At present there is quite a FrancoBritish university movement. As part of this, numbers of personalities of the Fighting French, among them many professors of French universities, are giving lectures at Oxford to make their country even better known ana to exchange views with their British colleagues. When the series of lectures and conferences was inaugurated, Sir David Ross, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, reviewed the influence in. England exercised by the French philosophers of the seventeenth century, the continuity of intellectual exchanges between the two countries and the common nature of the ideal for which they have both fought, together on many occasions. . “The Fighting French,” said Sir David, “have, like the martyrs of occupied France, sealed the total unity of Fighting France.” . Professor Rene Cassin, National Commissioner for Public Instruction, expressed the gratitude of the French intellectuals, who during the present struggle have found in England centres of freedom to keep the flame burning while the soldiers at the call of General de Gaulle reformed themselves into an army. France in the great drama we are living, he said, presented herself as Prometheus bound, whose will strains towards liberty, while her body is | chained to the earth and devoured by beasts of prey. England, left alone in the war, month after month, symbolised Atlas upholding the world. But suffering must be fruitful. For the equilibrium of Europe and world, we must, he said, prepare methodically for more perfect understanding between the French and British peoples. And education is one of the keys of the future.