May 8.
"Daily News"', of London, has been sending out a special respondent in search of that new world which, according to M. Leen Bourgeois, was born on the day of the first meeting of the League of Nations. The quest was! not promising. A friend, just back from the Continent, told him that "coming back to London after travelling about France, Germany and Austria' was like returning a dead city." On the Continent there was a real awakening, a revolt against war, a sincere enthusiasm for the new internationa ideal, The Englishman had made up his mind to forget war. Not yet discouraged, the wi went to the theatres to see if they had any message to deliver. He found two plays with promising names, "The Choice" and ''The Sunshine of the World', but there was nothing in then except the old fustian. Then he tried the London headquarters of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, which is holding a great conference at Geneva in June. He found that the women of Hungary wished to discuss ''the inherent vocal tion of woman to rear humanity in mutual love and respect for all races, creeds and classes st new humanity that would strive towards the reign of peace, justice, and equality in this erring world" the women of Germany assumed that the great problem would be how to bring about permanent peace; the London women were concerned only with the married woman's equality with man in respect of domicile.
contrast with the above, comes the report of the Commission under Sir James Galloway} appointed during the war to ascertain the reasons for the appalling number of C 3 men whom the Conscription Act revealed. The! and unabashed crime which dark-word appalling', by the way, is'ens every outlook; the nation frequently used by the Commis-! dances on a powder mill and the sion, as well it might be,! next decade will see a Soviet sit-remembering that during 1918 ting at Westminster. All of which one Londoner in every eight merely tends to strengthen the examined was suffering from belief that Britain is settling down tuberculosis.
The burden of again with remarkable speed. FExevidence went to prove that! perience teaches that the British the works of peace—bad drains, people are never more prosperous bad houses, bad food—are far; than when they are most quern. more murderous than war. Sir! tons. It is when everyone Francis Galton's estimate, sup-' eweer-tempered and least: is heard ported by other experts, is that in! of party discord-that one scents a normally healthy nation out of danger—as in these grim days of every hundred men seventy ought! the German advance in March, to be fit for full military service. 1918. Without doubt there is Curiously enough the coalfields, standing underground showed the highest average, the Welsh miners even yidded seventy-five fil men ner hundred. Some agricultural districts were) also up to Sir Francis Galton's standard, but not all. But when the industria! districts were tap-ned the yield drowned to thirty. Between November, 1917, and October, 1918, of two and a half millions of men examined, only three out of every nine could be called fit. Industrialism is sapping the nation's strength; and although we won the war it was at a cost to the best life of the nation too terrible to think of calmly. while the over-preponderance of weaklings left to be the fathers of the next generation is alarming.
Of the comparison between the physical and mental state of England thus depicted there may be two opinions. There can be no question that the degeneracy born of factory employment and the unhealthy conditions of life in great cities must be grappled with in all the seriousness that Government, municipalities and perhaps most important of all educationalists can command. But the lament tations of the ''Dail much amiss which has to be corrected. and the new world is not really born yet. The primal mistake lay in supposing that the end of fighting would suddenly make everrhedy good and kind and virtrious. Nations do not change in this wav, least of all the British.
But with the recent Budget, the story of the railway strike and the anier. unsurpassable fortitude with which millions of undistinguished folk met the war. all fresh in memory, one mav be sceptical of the predicted Nirvana, even if the millennium is not just yet in view.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.