On Friday last Professor Clarke, the distinguished advisor to overseas students of the London Institute of Education, gave an absorbing talk, full of penetrating psychological insights and charming in its easy familiarity of manner. His subject was: "Some Phases of Education in New Countries."

The newly-transformed Institute of Education was to become a forum, Prof. Clarke said, for students of education from the new countries. It was here that the great common problem of the countries of the British Commonwealth might be hammered out-how to shape citizens of the immemorial British type who would yet draw from and represent the richly diversified cultural backgrounds of the respective colonial countries. There was a common core in the culture of all the "new countries"—the Græco-Judæo-Roman heritage of Europe—but they each had their own unique contribution to make.

What Is a New Country?

To help discover this, we must analyse what gets the "new countries" apart, Geographically, said Prof. Clarke, sketching on the blackboard, they form a broken crescent—a curving chain of continents—North and South American, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. But it was not adaptation to new geographical conditions that singled out the new countries "What is the geographical justification for drinking whisky? Any climate at all!" In the fact of transplantation lay the salient feature of the new countries. Their colonisers, heirs to history and a way of life of their homeland opened a new chapter of history when they settled and created a new country. They tried to re-create their old life in the new country, but they couldn't help making a new life, meeting their needs by modifying features of the old appropriately to meet the new conditions?

Fear of the Naked Idea.

Certain inevitable weaknesses of the new countries were thus derived. Feeling a need to put together a a whole culture at once, the colonists erred on the side of "all-at-onceness." Because of their great successes in mastering nature and their material needs they were tempted to over-smipify all human problems into mathematical and material terms. This led to over-optimism, bumptiousness. Professor Clarke drew loud applause when he referred to another outstanding weakness of the new countries, New Zealand included-intellectual timidity. "We think an idea with its clothes off an indecent spectacle and hasten to clothe it in formula and conventionality." Fear of the ideas of a new social order—which cuts off the sources of future inspiration—was a belated fault.

Wake Up, New Zealand!

The Strength of the new countries lies in their strong sense of social solidarity, the spaciousness of the full leisured life they confer, their experimental spirit, and the fact that, being heirs to two cultures, the old and the new, they can correct the faults of each. Each of the new countries has a distinctive contribution to make to mark her place in the sun Wake up, New Zealand!

Our contemporary, the "dominion," states that law classes at V.U.C. are expected to drop in numbers after next year. This is comforting news to many who expected to come a thud next November.