TOPICS OF THE DAY

Waikato Times, Volume 122, Issue 20501, 18 May 1938, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY

The Peace Inherent

“It has always been a crisis of fighting, and not the gradual triumph of common sense, which has produced the various attempts at world-organisation, including the last. It is since the Great War that men have begun to speak of the ideal of humanity as an impossible motive: but this will pass. The ultimate triumph of a good in which all men may share, is the clearest lesson of history, but the concurrence at the moment of a great array of adverse circumstances calls for a stout re-affirmation of this simple and comprehensive creed. A. belief in the inherent soundness and force of the human spirit is the surest, indeed the only, permanent basis on which our excessive specialism and rampant-nationalism may be brought to order. Sure in the end, it may be said, but slow in the application. It was, of course, with this purpose that the League of Nations was set up at the end of the War, and it has done much good in a world exhausted by the sufferings it had endured, distracted by the ambitions of new and aggressive nations.”—Mr F. S. Marvin in The New Vision of Man.

Germany s Press Chief

The observation recently made by Herr Hitler on the treatment of German news in the foreign Press were interpreted to German journalists and foreign correspondents by Dr. Dietrich, the National Press Chief. “Dr Dietrich said that the policy of the German Government towards its own Press was much misunderstood abroad. The freedom of the Press, as the term was used in other countries, was a phantom, as the foreign Press was controlled hv large accumulations of capital, and journalists were forced to write at the bidding of their masters. In Germany the journalist had been made truly free, since individual responsibility had been imposed upon him, and from responsibility came freedom.” “Intelligent Nazi officials,” writes Mr A. J. Cummings in the News Chronicle, “if their judgment was not warped by the completeness of the Press tyranny in Germany itself, would recognise that

any attempt, hv whatever means, to intimidate the British Press from abroad would meet with so ferocious a retort that there would he nothing left of the intimidation. In the past few weeks I have met Germans and the representatives of other dictatorship countries who were convinced that the British Government, by the simple expedient of passing a Press law, could easily work its will (and, incidentally, the German will) upon the British Press. They do not see that any Government which committed that folly would he utterly destroyed, for it would he recognised at once in all parties as the first decisive step towards a Fascist domination in Britain.”