Danger Signals

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 185, 8 January 1943, Page 3

Danger Signals

HE ancients knew Hercules by the size of his feet: wherever they saw an especially big print in the sand or in the mud they knew who had made it. Today we mistrust both the sand and the mud. When the stones cry out or the mud speaks we awake to the. fact that something is happening. Otherwise we sleep. Something happened a week or two back in the academic world, but few of us noticed it. It was important, and it was dangerous, but we slept on. We did not realise that a heresy hunt had been started against an examiner in the University who had followed his instructions intel-ligently-read "the present day" as the days in which we now live, refused to convert "political and social" into military and imperial, and the Pacific ocean into the Atlantic. The questions he set, and his instructions to set them, our readers have now had before them for a week. The hunt is therefore over. But until the chase had gathered a good deal of speed we ourselves had not realised that there was anything more involved than the fact that some candidates or some teachers did not like the history paper. We know now that another attempt was being made to influence the University politically. What the examiner’s critics really meant when they charged him with asking questions outside the syllabus was that he had asked awkward questions inside the syllabus; and when they complained that he took the British Empire for granted they meant that he did not take it for granted but asked a question about the steps it has taken to adapt itself to the new world order. If the pursuit had not made all these noises it would not have been so clear as it now is that liberty is never safe anywhere -and that it is especially endangered in time of war, when feeling is so easily aroused, and there are so many opportunities for tyrants and bigots to exploit the silences that good citizens in times of crisis normally and cheerfully observe.