Editorial

At present we are agitating for Russian relief. Well and good; nothing that we can do will be too much for this heroic people, which has been struggling so hard and for so many centuries out of the darkness of its primitive and barbaric social system; which fought so hard in the war, and lost more dead than any other combatant, French, or German, or British; which still fought on in utter misery and exhaustion for horrible months of waste and betrayal at home and abroad; and finally went down as an active combatant before the rising forces of inevitable and welcome social revolution. If Russia is allowed to perish, all that is best in European civilisation and culture will perish with it, and the world will go back three or four thousand years in its outlook: on life. These are commonplaces to all thinking people—they ought to be so to every one. Therefore it is well that every country, moved by our common Western ideas and ideals, should do its best to help Russia to her feet again; it is not only a duty, it is (and it follows that it is) a page 10 matter of plain self-interest; and whatever we can conceivably do will be a matter not for self-congratulation, but for regret in falling so far short of our duty to ourselves and to the world.

We have been more or less touched by the plight of Russia and Central Europe; it makes even the most unthinking of us vaguely uncomfortable to think of a million or so children dying this winter of starvation, and utter destitution, and loathsome disease; even the news that the British Government sent over a few loads of rotten Australian wheat to alleviate the distress does not exactly satisfy our consciences; nor does an abortive conference, ruined by the magnificent isolation of the United States and the ugly temper of France, altogether inspire confidence. We want to do something. But why—why, in God's name!—do we wait until the earth is visited by this horrible nightmare before we want to do something? Starvation and misery ten thousand miles away is romantic, it stirs our imagination—can't we see any romance in improving our own immediate surroundings; does not misery and ugliness in New Zealand, in Wellington, stir our imagination? When war was declared eight years ago we all sang "God Save the Kings and waved our flags, and made wonderful speeches, and got a lump in the throat; and we were flooded with emotion, and admired our beautiful revival of patriotism immensely-and those people whose patriotism was overcome by their pity or their logic, we put in goal, and said, "Serve them right." Well, perhaps it did. But why, in God's name again, can't we carry our patriotism, and a more pitiful and logical patriotism, into our common life of today? The social condition of Wellington, if we only realised it, is ghastly (but it is not exactly patriotic to want to alter it). We are very well off, say our Cabinet Ministers—compare our position with Russia.—We have no right to compare our position with Russia and sink back with a satisfied smirk; the only country we have a right to compare ours with is a country not of this world, a civilisation towards which we are blindly striving and never reach. And when we compare thus consciously and strive with seeing eyes, we may possibly get a bit nearer.

It is our task as students of a University to try and get this vision and to act towards its realisation. Our city, the town that lies below our feet as we stand on our College steps, is a place it is for us to make better. It is ugly; so long as we forget the manmade part, we can see the grandeur of the hills and the sea in the night-time; but ask any town-planner—walk through it in broad daylight and look at the almost inconceivably brutal ugliness of the houses and the buildings, the dirtiness of the streets; climb up Mount Victoria and get a bird's-eye view of the smoke. It has slums and misery and want—don't listen to the Chamber of Commerce, but ask any school-teacher or any Plunket Nurse, or Canon Taylor; or stroll round Taranaki Street and Tory Street some day; and watch stunted children, misformed and crippled with infantile paralysis, play cricket with a rusty kerosene tin and half a bat (and still keep pitifully cheerful). It is frankly and crudely material in its aims and ideals—how much space is given in its papers to sordid murders and wretched embezzlements; to farmers' discussions on profit and loss; to silly mare's nests of al kinds, educational among others—and how much is given to the things page 11 that really and ultimately matter? What encouragement does literature get in Wellington? Or music, or any other art, or any kind of disinterested knowledge? Would it be profitable to any paper to give any of these things intelligent discussion? Or compare our Farmers' Institute, built in a year or so and paid for with ease and enthusiasm, with our University building, which has taken twenty-four years to reach its present state, lives a hand-to-mouth financial existence, and has no room for vital expansion. Compare our Police Station with our Art Gallery, our Midland Hotel with our Museum. Consider the drama that is good enough for us nine-tenths of our lives; for sheer vulgar pretentious ugliness think of the inside of our Grand Opera House and the ineptitude that went to the making of that.

We may not be able to change all this, but something we can do. Whatever it is, it will be a terribly long job, but possible; and it is not a thing to be shirked. Universities do not exist in a new country, in these modern days, primarily for learned research into the enclitic De, nor to settle Hoti's business, nor yet to give a tribe of dons an easy competence; they should be a vital, growing organ of truth and knowledge and fine living; the centre of social reform and progress. This, of course, involves the intellectual leadership of the community; there can be no profitable social movement without movement in thought and knowledge. It is equally true that we can do nothing without the feeling of social identity which must lie at the basis of our common effort, be it that of a small community, or national, or international. And here our University should fulfil another function, and fulfil it every day. We are more than a mere heterogeneous crowd of students with one eye on a degree and the other on the flesh-pots of the Haeremai Club. Degrees are at best a sign of more or less uncertain intellectual status, and at worst have a commercial value; the Haeremai Club is a remarkable and excellent institution, but even it is not spiritually all-sufficing. We have ultimately come together in the common pursuit of beauty and truth and goodness, and fellowship, which arises out of these three. Of course this is cant; but very good cant for all that. At the back of all our cruder manifestations lie these things of the spirit, of which degree and club are but the vague symbols. And these things lie at the back of all that is best and finest in the world today. It is given to us to seek them under especially favourable circumstances, and we must not fail in the seeking. Victoria University College does not consist in a heap of brick buildings, however imposing, or a list of honours, however long, in a University calendar; but in the common spirit that binds, or should bind, us all together—the spirit that finds itself in fellowship in the beautiful and the true and the good. There is nothing greater than these four things; they sum up all that we feel life worth living for. But there is something which lies at the root of them, which is greater in so far that its death means the death of all. Imagination is the sap which must run through the whole tree, and imagination we must cultivate before all things. If we had imagination would our University tradition and spirit be so woefully weak as it sometimes seems? Would our city be so ugly in looks and in soul? Our country given to such mean ends? Would the world be labouring in the stupidity and vindictiveness of a post-war settlement? Would Russian children be dying in the page 12 streets or dying unborn? "Fellowship," said William Morris, "is life, and lack of fellowship is death." We know it, and know it bitterly; but imagination, without which there can be no fellowship, is also life, and lack of imagination, death; and this in no mystical or supernatural way, but very simply and very literally.

"The aristocracy of the spirit," says a very fine and clear thinking modern writer,^* "is the only aristocracy in the world worth having, for any man may enter it. But it can only be worth entering if it exacts the highest from itself.... There is no arrogance in the work of an honest mind; there is plain speaking and humility. If, therefore, the republic of the spirit is to attract the loyalty of those without, it must at all costs maintain its inward probity. No man need join it unless he will, but once joined he must obey its single, simple law. To do less than his uttermost is to have betrayed the commonwealth to which he claims to belong." Here is food for thought; let us not push it away too easily to the back of our minds. We are young; after the last few years we should not be hopelessly visionary, entirely unpractical. We bear the future in our hands; can we not fashion it, not entirely unsuccessfully, more in the shape of our desire? We are young—

"If winter comes to winter
When shall men hope for spring?"