(Published Twice in the Session)

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Editorial

Another year of College life has opened, and opened for the first time for four years without the overhanging cloud of war; but while the cessation of hostilities has loosed a whole flood of eloquence on the righteousness or justice of this or that demand or treaty, and has set each little community busily concocting ways and means of celebrating peace, to us, as a College, it has a peculiar significance. For the men who have borne the brunt of the struggle arc coming back to civil life, and while discussion may be endless as to whether America won the war, or as to the desirability of a League of Nations, or as to what may be the best colour scheme for the coming celebrations, one important truth none attempt to deny, that we, both those that went and those that stayed, must " get on with life."

The need for reconstruction is present and insistent. The injury done to society by more than four years of war is incalculable, but it may be hoped not entirely irreparable. To sit down with folded hands and survey the damage done is an attitude comparable with the spirit that would suggest retaining, as a spectacle for touring American millionaires, the ruins of the once nourishing and smiling towns of Northern France. The most potent factor of all in this work of re-construction, the crying need of humanity to-day, is education. By no other means is it possible to undo, even in part, the harm already done; by no other means, after these years of abnormal conditions, can a sane and normal attitude towards life and humanity be developed. And the moment to commence this work of reconstruction is now, before the moss of familiarity has hidden from us the ugliness of the devastation wrought on such progress as civilisation had already page 16 accomplished. The University Senate, with uncommon wisdom, has recognised this, and by the granting of scholarships, by the removal of handicaps imposed by loss of time and by the allowing of a provisional matriculation to non-matriculated students who are returned men and wish to take up a course of study at any of the University Colleges, has offered every inducement to men who have come back from the war to take up a University career or to continue it if they had already begun.

A fair number of both graduates and undergraduates of the University of New Zealand are proceeding to Home Universities to carry on research work or complete their courses. Many of these have been awarded scholarships, Victoria College being well represented among the number.

Of those who have returned to New Zealand some have already availed themselves of the opportunities offered by the Senate. To such of these as have this year become for the first time members of the student body the welcome of the whole College is extended, and the hope that they may never regret such time as they may spend here. The accommodation at College can never become too cramped to admit of more of such students as these.

There are likewise returning more and more to their old places in College students already well known in corridors and halls. Their places, earned before a pressing need called them elsewhere, can never be filled by any but themselves, and the sight of these returning to their wonted ways lessens the vague sense of incompleteness that has been present in College life during the year's just past. These students, having acquitted themselves loyally first in academic, then in military life, arc above all others fitted for the upholding and passing on of that venerable mass of incentive and glamour which we call tradition, and which is so powerful an influence in the life of each new generation. It is to these students that we feel we may look for the strengthening of that College spirit which, strong of old, has shrunken a little during the lean years that have just worn out their course.

There has been among students a tendency to a general level of mediocrity; there have been no giants towering in spirit above their fellows to direct, undismayed by the fear of being great, the trend of sentiment and events. The feeling that we are "but little children weak, nor born to any high estate" seems to have grown with unfortunate rapidity. The past has been considered sufficiently glorious to cast a glow over the present, the future has all too frequently provided a convenient pigeon-hole for the stowing away of all obligations to the fulfilment of which no pressing necessity might seem to impel.

This attitude does not, however, arise from an overdose of Tagorean philosophy or a too serious acceptance of:

"Unborn to-morrow and dead yesterday,
Why fret about them, if to-day be sweet?"

These failings are but the fruit of inexperience, ll is from the lack of a sprinkling of older students that we have suffered. Now that they are returning to us again we look to them to give to the new life of College that mellowness and flavour that is the kindliest gift of Time and the gift of Time alone.