Evening Star Newspaper, February 14, 1932, Page 74

2 , THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, FEBRUARY 14, 1932, T e e S e S e — Shop.” Action, by youth, for youth—that was the motto of the Mosley New Party. It got out a weekly of its own called Action. Mosley financed it, and a mil- lionaire automobile manufacturer wno has Fascist ideas and who himself formed an industrial group for direct political action also put money into it. They spent $35,000 on the initial adver- tisement to boost it. It was a youth periodical, encouraging youthful writers and with plenty of stuff about hiking, opportunity, and the senility of every- body except the young, and a youth club with athletics and fencing and young speakers to arose youth to eothusiasm. CTION sold 160,000 of its first num- ber, and the youth leadcrs were jubi- lant. The first Hitler journal had sold only around a thousand, and Mussolini’s first Fascist paper had dropped into the pool of Italian life with scarcely a ripple. What could Mosley not do with his 160,- 000 sales at the kick-off? Action lasted precisely 13 numbers, and then the Mesleyites decided to cut their loss and stop it. It died with the old year. What had happened? Well, the big initial sales were accounted for by the terrific preliminary boost. The big drum was banged, the people rolled up, but when they got in the show didn't amuse them, and so they didn’t come again. Sales dropped like a parachute, until they were down to 15,000. Losses were piled up at the rate of $18,000 a week. The editor, Harold Nicolson, the critic and ardent champion of the Bloomsbury school of literature, but lacking the com- mon touch of a capable Hitler or Musso- 1ini lieutenant, said that while they hoped they would be reviving the journal some day, he feared that day was remote. Youth, in short, entirely failed to get excited about the New Party, whose can- didates for Parliament to the number of a score or more were knocked out to a man at the polls. All with the exception of Mosley himself failed to poll the mini- mum number of votes required to save their $650 deposit, and so had to for- feit it. The English powers-that-be do not now fear that youth will seek to take matters into its own hands, but rather that youth needs to be stimulated and encouraged to a bolder and more ener- getic course of individual action. They apprehend that youth is not shaping up as well as might be expected. They also feel that in the new world that is roll- ing from the cosmic mill, British youth will have to pull its socks up if it is going to hold on the heritage accumulated at the expense of so much toil, blood and treasure by its forefathers. The dole scandals have shown that tens of thousands of youths and young men would rather draw the dole than work. At the other end of the social scale you find an equal proportion of young men who want to live like gentle- men of leisure on their patrimony, or, lacking a patrimony, seek any easy way of making a living in preference to studying hard, working hard, entering the great competitive fight of life and leaving the drawing rooms, boudoirs, clubs and restaurants of London and the country houses of their kinfolk and friends. I have talked to scores of successful *“overfifties” about youth, and nine out of ten have a stock line of complaint: “They won’t work.” Some will qualify with . . . “asI used to work when I was a youngster.” “Won't work” is, of course, a relative term. These men have been terrific workers. They want the same intensive energy and application from the younger generation now, and, not getting it, they become bears on youth. The politicians shout in patriotic vein. “Yes,” sneers youth, “I know you. You want me to give my life for your coun- try. You did that once before, to my elder brother. You don’t do it to me!” “Why should I worry myself?” de- mands the young man with from $2,500 to $5,000 or so a year from government bonds. “I'm happy. I'm comfortable. I shall marry eventually a girl with some money, and we shall be all right. If I set up in business I'll probably lose my capital; and if I make a lot of ‘money, half of it will be taken from me in taxa- tion’ ATHERS talk about the zest of risk; but the youngster is acquainted with risk—he flys a light airplane or runs an 80-mile-an-hour sports car. They talk about the beauties of ambition and hard work, but youth looks around among the successful and says that all ambition and work seem to have got for them is a pot belly, premature hardened arteries, a recky heart, a boied wife, spoiled daugh- ters—and no fun. Besides, what's the use? There’ll be another war, or a revolution, or some- thing, and it’ll all go smash anyway. So why worry? Most students of thi: phenomenon ex- plain it by reference to the war. These young men—they run up to a blase 30— are pups of the war litter. They were “The Youth problem has stimulated various movemenis to provide facilities for sports.” boys theg, and most of them were spoiled by women whose maternity complex had been overstimulated by anxiety or the grief of losing elder ones. After 1918 they emerged into a world singularly be- reft of young men. ‘They were spoiled then by hostesses and by girls in those dance-mad years. A girl would have to telephone a dozen men sometimes before she could find an escort for a dance, hostesses fought for the available young men like women scrambling for bargains at a remnant sale. Men who had done well out of the war befriended well edu- cated presentable yeung men; they were a social asset at parties and about one’s house. Further, this generation differed from other generations in that it had no elder brothers to set an example, keep it in its place, lick it into shape, tell it roughly not to be a fool. A million men England lost in four years of war, and the bulk of them were young. The cream went in the early phase. They were the volunteer material of 1914 and 1915. The gap between youth and age was surpris- ing in the social life of England after 1918. All this had its softening and effemi- nizing influence upon the war-time litter of male children. With some, it was a phase they got over. With others, it hardened into set character: An investigator went down to Oxford at term opening this year for the Daily Mail and got a verdict on 1932 under- graduates from a composite jury of dons, tailors, restaurateurs, college porters and university officials. The consensus of opinion was that, compared with his predecessors of the last 12 years, the new undergraduate has more brains, less money, more concentration, fewer wom- an friends and takes fewer drinks. The implication is that since the war students have had more or less of the aforesai® things than was healthy for them. C. B. Cochran, the Flo Ziegfeld of London, recently put on a show which had a chorus of 60 young men from Ox- ford and Cambridge Universities. Their university training had done that much for them! Effeminacy has been curi- osity rife at Oxford. There remains the new generation, the boys who will soon be entering the uni- versities or going out without a univer- sity education to make their way in life. So far as the backbone middle class is concerned, apprehensions about how the new generation will turn out find ex- pression in attack upon the public school system. “Public school” is a contradiction in terms. A British “public” school is ex- cessively private and exclusive. What an American would call a public school, in England is a council or state school, where education is free. Nobody who can possibly afford to send his children to a private school sends them to a state school. In “Who’s Who” you will find many self-made men, some of them now baronets and barons, who, unable to write the magic name of a public school The Farms of the U. S. Washing Away HAT nature has taken 400 years to create, Americans in their disregard for the future are prodigally wasting in seven years and in some cases a single year. Taking as an example of the terrible de- pletion of soil fertility in this country through erosion the case of the so-called Shelby loam of Missouri and Iowa is cited by H. H. Ben- nett, soil expert of the Department of Com- merce. This soil, some of the best in the Corn Belt, is possessed of a high fertility built up at the rate of about one inch per 400 years. Definite and accurate tests have shown that on land with a slope of only four feet per 100 loses one inch of the top soil every seven years due to the washing effect of heavy rainfall. In cases where the grade is eight feet per 100, the inch of top soil is washed away in one year. A condition of this sort can end only in the complete impoverishment of the soil unless adequate steps are taken to prevent the loss of the entire surface layer. The loss of fer- tility of soil through successive crops of one type without any resting of the fields is seri- ous, but this can be built up through the use of fertilizers. In the case of loss of fertility due to erosion, the entire body of the soil is gone and not only fertility but humus is nec- essary to bring the soil back into condition. It is estimated that erosion takes 21 times as much fertility out of the soil in a given year as the growing of a crop for that year. The effect of erosion is so widespread that It is a definite menace to 75 per cent of the land under cultivation in this country. There is no question of immediate shortage of farm Jand involved in the erosion problem, for the crops now produced are, or have been for the past year or two, beyond the capacity of the country to consume. It is in the future that the danger lies. China stands as an exampls of what deforestation and erosion will do to a country. The two factors go hand in hand, for the cutting to timberlands takes from the lower lying fields the blotter which absorbs and yields only gradually the heavy rainfalls that become raging torrents when permitted to run down open and unprotected hillsides. Terracing, drainage systems and planting of poor and higher lands to trees are the prin- cipal methods of overcoming erosion and a campaign is being waged by the Department of Agriculture to bring the danger and the remedies before the farmers. The planting of trees on submarginal lands is a method which has more than insurance features, for it will provide a future source of income to the farmer when it becomes possible to harvest lumber from the trees. One Blossom Is Really Many HE beautiful blossom of the aster and the more simple bloom of the daisy, while they are widely different in appearance, belong to the same general family, a family which composes, perhaps, as much as one-seventh of all the vegetation in this country and consti- tute by far the largest single family group. These flowers, the Compositae, include the sun- flower, the chrysanthemum, the goldenrod, thistle, dandelion, sagebush, ragweed, resin- weed and other such common plants. A single bloom, on close examination, is found to be not one bloom, but many closely joined into & common head with the cuter flowers putting out the showier petals which give the illusion of a single flower. after their name, put: “Educated pri- vately.” In nine cases out of ten “edu=- cated privately” means “educated at & board school,” and in the same number of cases the fact is camouflaged through snobbery or a well founded fear of loss of prestige—“A lord? Pooh! He’s no better than us—why, ’e went to a board school, like our Alf!” THE British “public” schools are a system and an inc<titution which do not exist in other countries. They have provided the colonists and imperial ade venturers, and the personnel for the administration of India and Britain’s tropical possessions. They feed the pro=- fessions. But they do not seem to be producing the right type in quantity any longer; and the Rev. Dr. Nairn, for 25 vears headmaster of the famous Mer= chant Taylors’ School, recently described them as “strongholds of social exclusive= ness and nurseries of snobbery.” They are chiefly occupied today in producing a type of man who fits into a readymade world and a static imperial machine, They are manufacturing selfe satisfied gentlemen for a gentleman’s world; but that world is already in ruins. They do not produce men of energy, of resource, of wide mind, fertile, able, quick, adventurous. They no longer pro« duce pioneers. New traditions will have to be made, new ideals formulated. The ideal of losing like a gentleman is not enough, It is more important to win like a man. Tens of millions of pounds of trade have been lost to Britain because an adminise tration packed with public school trained men in key places had been taught that it is vulgar to push, to advertise. Big men had to break down that stifling tradition and get the Prince of Wales to advocate pushfulness. The Prince of Wales made his call to youth for service, for a move away from the excessively materialistic view of life. In Italy and Germany and Russia youth has responded to the call of service and of sacrifice. Youth is enigmatic, but one certain thing about it is that it will go Spartan and devote itself heart and soul to a cause if it can find a cause worth while and a leader who will give it some= thing it can bite its teeth into. It is equally certain that youth is liable to make trouble and go sour or bad if it is not provided with an outlet for its energy, and has reason to lack that fine robust pride in the existing state of civil= ization which characterizes the people who built that civilization, the fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers of latter-day youth. If the elder generation which is in control in England can pull it together and make it a trifle more dynamic and a land of more hope for youth, and turn the eyes of youth to a brighter future rather than beg them always to be look= ing back with worship at the mossy old gray walls of the “glorious past” some= thing big and solid should come of this unique appeal to a generation which has considerable cause for irreverence and lack of faith,